The Tragedy of Brady Sims

September 1, 2017
A young reporter on assignment learns the history of a town's black community.After graduating from college in California, Louis Guerin has returned to his Louisiana hometown to work as a reporter for the Bayonne Journal, the weekly newspaper. As the story opens, a man named Brady Sims shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of two crimes, in front of the judge, jury, and courthouse bystanders, including Louis, who's covering the case. Assigned to write "a human interest story" on Brady, Louis spends a day at the town barbershop and learns that his subject was the disciplinarian for the quarter, the town's black section, whipping children (mostly boys) who erred in an effort to keep them from the worse fate of ending up in Angola, the infamous state prison. As the barbers, customers, and shop loiterers talk, they offer a fuller and occasionally sympathetic picture of Brady while simultaneously showing how World War II, technology, and the Great Migration caused strife for those living in the quarter. Those larger themes, though central to the story, are expressed perhaps at the expense of a deeper portrayal of Brady. Though Mapes, the town sheriff and one of Brady's only friends, attempts to provide nuance to the character of a reputedly violent man, his testimony does not quite help generate adequate sympathy for Brady. In his first novel in more than 20 years, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Gaines (Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays, 2005, etc.) returns to the themes (crime, punishment, and compassion) and milieu (the rural South) for which he is best known, telling a simple yet provocative tale that reverberates from its Southern core, with a keen ear for the way men talk when they are among each other. Though readers may come to understand Brady's motivations for killing his son in this expertly rendered story, they may do so with varying levels of sympathy for him. Gaines competently reveals his central character's motivations, but that might not be enough to make readers care about the man's fate.

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September 1, 2017
Celebrated for such reverberating works as A Lesson before Dying (1993), Gaines draws on his Jim Crow Louisiana childhood in his first new novel in years, a taut and searing tale about race and small-town justice. Cub reporter Louis Guerin arrives at the courtroom just in time to see Brady Sims shoot dead a just-convicted defendant. Sims asks for two hours before Mapes, the white sheriff, arrests him; Louis has until midnight to write the story. So he heads to the barbershop, where the aging barbers and their usual retinue slowly and circuitously reveal all the suffering that led to Brady Sims killing his own son. While Louis patiently listens to their meandering stream of memories, commentary, jokes, asides, and taunts, a stranger fidgets and fumes, anxious to get back to his New Orleans gal but unable to tear himself away. The history the men recount is, indeed, riveting in its insights into how racism harms everyone, crystallized in Mapes' heartbroken tribute to his friend: Hell of a man, that Brady Sims. Gaines tells a hell of a story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)