A Miracle of Catfish

December 4, 2006
This sprawling novel was unfinished when Mississippi writer Brown (Dirty Work
, etc.) died at 53 in 2004. (It remains so, according to a note from editor Shannon Ravenel, who includes Brown's own notes for how the novel would end.) Cortez Sharp, a widower in his later years, decides to build a catfish pond on his Mississippi acreage, mostly because the pond will serve (he imagines drily and obliquely) to bring others around and assuage his dark loneliness. Nearby live young Jimmy and his ne'er-do-well father ("Jimmy's daddy"). There's also Lucinda, who is Cortez's daughter and the mother of Albert, a young man with Tourette's syndrome who speaks in rhyming obscenities. Lucinda pops tranquilizers and has a talent for getting into odd squabbles (over the quality of pigs' feet in a supermarket, for one). Elsewhere, Cleve, an African-American ex-con, kills a soldier who is the object of his daughter's affections and hides the body in the woods. Despite the cuts that Ravenel says were made (marked in the text with ellipses), there's a lot of superfluously detailed family history, interior monologue and Dixie atmospherics. Would-be boffo sequences (Cortez driving a tractor into the pond; Jimmy becoming inconsolable when his father sells his beloved Go Kart), are not sharp enough to carry one through.

Starred review from December 1, 2006
When he passed away unexpectedly in 2004 at age 53, beloved Southern fiction writer Brown (e.g., "Joe; Father and Son") left behind a virtually complete manuscript for a sixth novel. Although it concludes after 450 pages with Brown's notes for the final chapters, it may nonetheless be his finest work. The masterly narrative returns to rural, hardscrabble Mississippi and features as its protagonist a charming and vulnerable ten-year-old boy named Jimmy. The adults in Jimmy's life are reckless and deeply flawed, and Brown beautifully captures Jimmy's innocence and puzzled understanding of the complex adult world he sees. Brown also brings vividly to life Jimmy's family and a large cast of colorful, beleaguered, and sometimes dangerous neighborhood characters. Often humorous but sometimes harrowing, this multilayered story about fatherhood, a boy's go-kart, and a new catfish pond is effortlessly and joyously told. Enthusiastically recommended.Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2006
Brown died of a heart attack in 2004, leaving behind his sixth novel--short one ending. Unfortunate, as that is about the only thing missing from this rugged, masterful work. Brown's writing is both caustic and gratifying, his fully wrought characters despicable yet irresistible, and the rural South environs alternately suffocating and idyllic. Cortez Sharp, the near definition of a crotchety old man, builds a catfish pond on his property, awaiting fishing season with the giddy anticipation of a boy. Down the dirt road from Cortez's farm lives such a boy, Jimmy. Too bad for Jimmy, his daddy is nothing but a screwup whose primary preoccupations are driving around drinking beer and neglecting his son. At age nine, the boy has never once gone fishing with his father, which in this world amounts to a tragedy of nigh epic proportions. The gulf between Cortez, who embodies the older, southern-gothic tradition with all its inherent prejudices and violence, and Jimmy's daddy, the picture of modern white trash, is vast and resonant. Though Brown is no stranger to exploring father relationships, his biggest coup is how adeptly he slides into the agile cadence of a nine-year-old's far-wandering thoughts. The result is heartrending. One can only hazard a guess at the missing final chapters, but the brutally funny, eloquent wonders that remain are innumerable. Damned fine, and a damned shame.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)