JOE, the late, great Larry Brown's first masterwork in novel form

JOE
LARRY BROWN
Algonquin Books
$15.95 paper, available now

Now only $1.99 on Kindle, so don't wait. (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won’t slow down—not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he’s desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption—or ruin.

Kirkus, back in 1991 when they hated everything, said this of the book: "...Brown...pares his prose close to the bone, stripping away the slightest hint of sociology or regional color. This is white trash, lumpen fiction with a vengeance, and a vision of angelic desolation."

My Review: Selected as the May 2020 Moderator's Choice in the On the Southern Literary Trail Goodreads group, this is the novel that solidified Larry Brown's place in Grit Lit/Hick Lit's pantheon. He was a major talent; his short stories will, I think, be anthologized and lionized for a long time to come. He started out as a writer known for them; and I think that, like Hemingway, they will be his lasting contribution to Southern Literature's grittier edge.

This is not to denigrate or diminish his accomplishment in this, his most successful novel:

The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.

You know where you are; you know who you're with; you're not going for a madeleine with Proust. This is poverty, this is heat, this is misery on an epic scale but never ever looked at...it's witnessed, it's so real and so present that there is just not one doubt about its honesty. Heat and poverty are characters in this scene so cinematically framed. The people are, in fact, incidental if not ornamental. They exist as morality-play embodiments of Poverty, and they continue to do so throughout the book.

Is that a flaw? Is honest appraisal and presentation of reality ever a flaw?

“That boy,” he said. “I’ve done him ever favor I could. Some folks you can’t do nothing with. Just sorry. God knows I’ve done plenty of drinking and stuff in my time, but I be damn if I ever tried to cheat anybody out of any money.”

Is that a speech delivered to make an author's point, or is it the vox populi, the distilled belief of the Average Man that he is in fact average, the proper measure of a man's worth? It's certainly a refutation of the three-hundred-year-old moralism vox populi, vox dei! There is no god in this book, there is no numinous or immanent quality to anything. The landscape is hot, dry, miserable; the people are dumb, violent, miserable; the vox regis or deorum is notable only for its absence.

Also notably absent here are women's voices. They exist to bear children and beatings. They are adversaries to what low, animal joys men can find in sex (more akin to rape, in my opinion) and beer. Children are the punishment women inflict on men (as these men see it) for the fleeting pleasure of the rut. The idea of pleasure is, in general, absent from this world. It is a place where no one at all ever makes even a feint at a genuine smile.

What redeems this read from being a complete, utter, suicidal-depression-inducing downer? Joe Ransom. Drunken convict that he is, awful father that he may in fact be, to Gary Jones he is Jesus freshly down from the cross. Gary's sperm donor is a memorable...a matchless, actually...portrait of the kind of person I, in my damned close to infinite privilege, have never interacted with. He pimps out his prepubescent daughter. He does nothing of value to anyone, not even himself:

“She don’t like to be around anybody drinkin, don’t even like to smell it. I drink and I like to drink. That’s it.”

That's the least-offensive thing the man utters in this book. Probably in the whole of life. His son, his who-knows-how decent and good-souled son, makes him feel more worthless than he already does; not, however, as worthless as he actually is.

Gary goes to work for Joe on a county work crew. Joe, ex-con bad dad Joe, shines like a savior to him, modeling the astounding heights of not-stealing, of not-beating while being a man. Gary's life changes because he sees a possibility he never saw before. As events unfold, that possibility is embodied in a redemptive act of startling generosity, of genuine salvation.

And Joe chooses to save, not his own flesh and blood, but someone whose life trajectory makes Joe's own fucked-up life look like my wealth and privilege by comparison. If not for Larry Brown, I doubt I'd've made a second's time for these men.

Isn't this what fiction's meant to do? To make us, all of us really but especially the most shockingly privileged among us, pause and allow The Other to take unsentimental shape in our emotions?

Larry Brown did this to me, for me, and I am deeply grateful to him for it.

Book-A-Day #13: A great novel title, HILL WILLIAM

HILL WILLIAM
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Tyrant Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Beginning to read Hill William is like tuning into a blues station at 4:00 a.m. while driving down the highway. Scott McClanahan's work soars with a brisk and lively plainsong, offering a boisterous peek into a place often passed over in fiction: West Virginia, where coal and heartbreak reign supreme. Hill William testifies to the way place creates and sometimes stifles one's ability to hope. It reads like a Homeric hymn to adventure, to the human comedy's upsets and small downfalls, and revels in its whispers of victory. So grab coffee, beer—whatever gets you through the night—and join Scott around the hearth. Lend him your ear, but be warned: you might not want it back.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, lucky number 13, asks us to discuss a novel with the best title. I think this is about it.

Now surely y'all remember my review of Crapalachia: A Biography of Place from 2013, right? How I warbled myself hoarse over its 4.5-star glory? Sure! Okay then, go take a quick peek at it and get back in the head of appreciating hillbilly noir or hick lit or whatever we've decided to call it.

And here he is again, Scott McClanahan, to make the fat and oblivious mainstream look, really look, at life among those who don't have much, and that includes hope. This time it's explicitly labeled fiction, so no one's going to run up to McClanahan on stage at a reading and demand to know if Event X happened and when.

Yeah, right.

The reason that's still going to happen is simple: Scott McClanahan inhabits this book the way a djinn inhabits a lamp. He's on your bookshelf. He's lookin' paper-pale, somebody feed the boy some vitamin D-for-decoding! We vivify the writer as we read the writing.

I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop because it felt good.

Just like right now I find myself getting ready to do it.

I hit myself.

I feel the blood surging to my head.

I hit myself.

I feel my jaw tightening.

I hit myself.

It feels like a prayer.

I hit myself.

It feels like something strange.

I hit myself.

It feels like something beautiful.

And that's before the page count gets to double digits. Now, some several of you aren't liking this too terrible much. It's not your favorite thing, it's not going somewhere you're interested in going...yes yes, I get it, it's challenging your definition of entertainment. It did mine, too.

Go on the trip. Yes, it's off your route, past your exit, beyond your slip. Fiction, fact-ion, roman à clef, metafiction, whatever tidy label you need to smack on the package, smack it on and open it up and settle in for an afternoon with someone who doesn't speak Cultured like a native because he isn't.

In a world that celebrates the bland venality of getting and spending, a moment like this...a scant two, maybe three hours' read for most of us serious bookheads...is uncommon and worthy of note and celebration. This isn't bland, and it's less venal than venereal. It won't lull or cosset you, but Hill William (isn't that a great title?) will not send you to bed wondering what you read that day. If anything.

An excellent summer read: CRAPALACHIA by Scott McClanahan

CRAPALACHIA: A Biography of Place
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Two Dollar Radio
$12.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Scott McClanahan was fourteen he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Crapalachia is a portrait of these formative years, coming-of-age in rural West Virginia.

Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.

My Review: Memoir...I remember...that's what makes this book so damn good, Scott remembers and he tells us that he remembers, wants us to remember with him. I've never lived in West Virginia, I've only driven through it in my expensive car and thought, "ye gods and little fishes, is this for real?!" and pressed a little harder on the gas to get the fuck out of there. I've never even spent a night there. I drove an extra hour out of my comfort zone (6 hours behind the wheel is enough for me) so I wouldn't have to.

But I remember with Scott McClanahan. I'm 20 years older than he is. I've lived the entirety of my life in upper-middle-class assurance of comfort and joy. When I haven't had any money, I've had friends and loved ones and even random strangers who shared with me. And it never, ever looked like the pictures Scott paints in my head.

It's beautiful, this picture, these pictures, but it's not pretty. It's warty and cold and shaped funny. But oh how much there is to celebrate in the life of a kid who knows where home is and what his family is made of and scoops up the mud he's standing on to make something new of something old.

She hobbled along some more and I walked behind her.
She said: "This is the grave I wanted to see. This is the grave."
I asked: "Whose grave is it?"
I walked in front of the stone and I saw it was her grave. It was the grave of Ruby Irene McClanahan, born 1917 died...
Then there was a blank space--the space where they would put the date of her death.
She touched the shiny stone and explained...her really good deal on the tombstone. She told me I should start saving. It was a good investment.

The tales of this Crapalachian boy are muddled and mixed, of course, as all memories are, and as honest as they are, they aren't always factual. In the appendix to the book, Scott tells us the places he knows he mashed things up and rearranged them, since after all he was writing a story and stories have their own needs. But he never violates, not once in this book, the one Commandment of Memoir: Condescend not, lest ye be caught and pilloried. (See: James Frey.)

I wouldn't write about how people stared at {Uncle Nathan} when I pushed him down the road. They stared and shook their heads....
I knew I would never write about Nathan's light-blue eyes--eyes as blue as Christmas tree lights.
I knew I would never write about his soft heart. The softest heart I have ever known.

I knew he believed in something that none of us ever do anymore. He believed in the nastiest word in the world. He believed in KINDNESS. Please tell me you remember kindness. Please tell me you remember kindness and joy, you cool motherfuckers.

Why read some thirtysomething kid's memoirs? What kind of philosophical point can someone that young make? I wonder, is it even necessary to make a point? Can it be enough to read a book like this, about a young life seen from middle age (can't be much under 35, this kid, and that's spang in the middle of life), and eat the textures and smell the regrets of someone new to the idea that The End applies to him, too? He has children, he tells us so. He tells us that he went from place to place in the world leaving dirt from West Virginia there, giving the dirt to strangers and leaving it in the soil of New York City and Seattle and suchlike. So his children, no matter their wanderings, would have something of their, his, his grandmother's home waiting.

I don't know that I believe him.

"Oh lordie, I'm feeling horrible," she said. Then she clutched her chest. "I'm having chest pains." I kissed her cheek and I said, "I'll see you next week." She told me my grandfather Elgie used to have nightmares begging for the whistle to stop.
She wasn't dying.
She was lonely.

So I left and I heard Ruby shouting again, "Oh lordie, I'm dying." I didn't turn back. I wasn't sure we were even born yet. We were all inside of a giant mother right then and we were waiting to be born. Just like tomorrow, at dawn, we will be held in the arms of a giant mother. We will find warmth and maybe even war there.

I want us all to be ready.

Ready? We're none of us ready, ever. As his kids grow up he'll find that out.

And then there's the story of the little girl and the locket. It's near the end of the book, it's a memory from adulthood. It made me cry for a half-hour, angry and hurting and so so sad, helpless in the face of a world we've made with action, inaction, consent, and indifference (driving faster to escape someone else's reality ring a bell?).

But hey, Scott? I remember. I'm with you.