Fay

Starred review from April 3, 2000
The South of Larry Brown (Dirty Work) is a country devoid of genteel manners and magnolia trees. His deeply flawed characters generally lack money, education and a fair chance at the pursuit of happiness, yet he portrays them square-on, with a restrained compassion that neither panders to nor patronizes their struggling, often violent lives. This saga of degradation and violence is his most powerful novel yet. It is the coming-of-age story of a young woman whose downward trajectory seems fated, despite the glimmers of luck that she hopes are her salvation. Fay Jones is 17 years old when she runs away from her sexually abusive father and the poor white family shack outside of Oxford, Miss. Dangerously innocent and naive about the world (she has never used a telephone or left a tip in a restaurant), she is stoic, resourceful and desperate to better herself. Like everyone else in this novel, she is addicted to beer and cigarettes; whiskey and dope will come later. And she is beautiful, which is both the source of opportunity and the limit of her aspirations. It seems almost too good to be true when trooper Sam Harris rescues Fay and takes her to his lakeside home. His wife, Amy, still grieving over the death of their teenage daughter, takes Fay under her wing. But Amy is an alcoholic, and in one of the car crashes that punctuate the novel--all caused by drunken drivers--she is killed. Though he is already involved with a predatory mistress, Sam falls in love with Fay and she with him; when Fay becomes pregnant; she has a brief vision of a safe and settled life. The cycle of events that ensue--a murder in self-defense, Fay's flight to Biloxi, sexual exploitation, several premeditated killings--are, in the force field of this story, inevitable and preordained. All his characters, including the decent, anguished Sam (who is heroic in his police work) and bewildered, frightened Fay, behave foolishly, rashly and badly. Yet Brown's laconic narrative is constructed on a merciful understanding of his characters' limitations. Though he takes a long time to get the plot under way, describing such mundane activities as fishing and police patrols in the detail necessary to make them clear, the narrative acquires tension and velocity and by the end the reader is mesmerized, waiting for a gun to go off, but praying for a miracle. There are no miracles, of course, but the raw power of this novel, the clear, graphic accounts of both humble and perverted lives (in the bars and strip joints of Biloxi), is a triumph of realism and a humane imagination.

February 15, 2000
When 17-year-old Fay walks out on her abusive, dirt-poor backwoods family, she is taken in by Mississippi trooper Sam Harris and his wife, Amy. First a surrogate for a dead daughter, Fay is soon Sam's lover and becomes pregnant after Amy dies (in a car accident involving alcohol), but then, more or less in self-defense, she shoots and kills Sam's ex-lover while Sam is on patrol. She flees, again on foot, this time ending up with Aaron, a volatile, violent, and bulked-up bouncer and part-owner of a Biloxi strip joint. The magnetic Fay innocently draws (big) trouble in Brown's (Joe) hard-drinking, hard-drugging South; you just know a lot of people are going to die in this hard-to-put-down book but not exactly who, when, why, or at whose hands. It's like George Pelecanos (ethos) meets James Lee Burke (atmosphere), or Daniel Woodrell (characters) meets Anita Shreve (star-crossed passion). Just don't look for it on Oprah. Highly recommended.--Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2000
Brown follows his tragic "Father and Son" (1976) and the contemporary classic "Joe" (1992) with this sexy, violent, gripping tale of a naive 17-year-old who turns men's heads everywhere she goes but sends them to their bloody doom. Fay Jones wanders out of the sharecropping backcountry into Oxford, Mississippi, and is befriended by a discontented highway patrol officer, Sam Harris, who takes her home to his wife, Amy, who still grieves over her lost daughter. In a touching scene, Amy takes her drunken sorrow to the backroads, where she cruises in revery until a logging truck kills her. Fay and Sam become lovers and live a sandy, boozy, halcyon life on the water, until a fierce former lover of Sam's makes an appearance and tries to shoot Fay. Fay shoots her instead and flees, as Sam plunges into a spiral of suspicion and despair. Meanwhile, Fay takes up with a brutal pimp and drug dealer in Biloxi, who is destined for a bloody death as well when Sam tries to rescue Fay, but Fay moves on, still innocent despite the blood in her wake. Nobody does cop talk, strip clubs, and fishing better than Brown, and his novel is worth the price if only for Sam's heroic, wrenching performance at the wreck of a tanker truck. The agony of the driver and the futile, frantic work of firefighters, before everything blows sky high, are painfully authentic. This is awful, beautiful work from the King of White Trash. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)