#AmReading
In preparation for the writing of my third novel, presently titled Eustace Saves, I chose to read Larry Brown's novel Fay as a sort of mindset-maker, a tone and feel to wrap my writing brain around before embarking on my own dark journey through the gritty South of the early 1980s. I've read Mr. Brown before - Father & Son and Joe (a movie of which exists, starring the Oscar-winning version of Nic Cage) - so knew going in that he had a style and a cadence and a way with Southern characters in which it would be good to immerse myself. I am a Southerner by birth (and a Tarheel by the grace of God), but haven't lived in the South since 2001, so a little refresher in customs and culture couldn't hurt, was my reasoning. And man oh man did I pick well. Not only did Fay fulfill my selfish requirements, it also turned out to be one of the best Southern novels I've ever read, a stark, uncompromising and grotesquely charming, almost picaresque portrait of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world where she isn't worth anything but what can be taken from her.
Fay, the character, wanders out of the narrative halfway through Joe, and that's precisely where Brown finds her again, walking away. From poverty, from hopelessness, from a vagabond life with no reward but continued toil, from a fractured family riddled with addiction, madness, and more hardship than a young heart can bear, and from a father on the brink of amorality. Fay knows next to nothing of the world she's wandered through, but she's gonna learn mighty damn quick. Part road novel, part unraveling family saga, and all painfully honest in its portraiture of human flaws and frailties, Fay is a masterpiece of style and content, everything about it works. It's like a more linear novel by Faulkner, a less language-laden McCarthy, infused with Brown's own visceral feel for Mississippi and his direct, sharp, sublty-biting prose.
The novel comes in just shy of 500 pages, and I easily would have read 500 more. Alas, however Fay ends - no spoilers here - her story is forever over, as Mr. Brown passed away a little more than a decade ago at the age of 53, too goddamn young. I wouldn't recommend Fay as the first Larry Brown you read, but I would recommend you read some Larry Brown ASAP.
