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Title: Joe by Larry Brown ISBN: 0446394386 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: October, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.91
Rating: 4
Summary: Liked Everything but the Ending
Comment: I am a new fan of Larry Brown, and have lately been reading everything by him I can get my hands on. Joe is a powerful and at times brutal novel, a notch below Father and Son in my humble opinion but worthwhile reading nonetheless.
Once again Brown explores the lives of drunk white trash, this time in the dusty small towns near Tupelo Mississippi. The novel has three main characters: Joe, the aging, proud, divorced, hard-drinking ex con who contracts to poison trees for income, and who hires young Gary on his work crew. Gary is about 15 years old, but is not quite sure cause as has no birth records and in fact no legal address. His dad, Wade, is a horrific drunk who moves his family around squatting in abandoned houses while he puts the kids to work foraging for cans and bottles to collect deposit money. When that doesn't generate enough, Wade steals any meager earnings the kids may make on their own.
The budding relationship between Joe and his best worker Gary is the core of the novel, as Joe slowly learns the extent of the horrors of the kid's home life. Of course what would a novel of the south be without a few humerous diversions involving brothels, gambling, green policemen and inept hunters, etc.
I think my only real hesitancy in giving the novel five stars revolves around the ending, which for me was anticlimatic and unsatisfying. I know writers are sometimes criticized for tying up all loose ends too neatly, as if they reached their pre-ordained page limit and had to run, but the ending of Joe was a little too open-ended for my liking. Anyway, for fans of Harry Crews, William Gay (and I am Gay's biggest fan) or Tom Franklin, give Brown a shot he consistently delivers a solid punch.
Rating: 5
Summary: Brown's Best
Comment: Larry Brown's best novel in my opinion. If you have never read Brown you should give him a try. It is serious fiction. One clarification of another review: neither Joe nor any of Brown's other novels are set in the Delta. They are set in North Central Mississippi east of the delta.
Rating: 5
Summary: powerful poetics from a master of the game
Comment: so, here i am again, drunk, trying to tell you why i think "joe" is a wonderful novel and worthy of your attention. i'm not going to mention the beautiful pain of the writing, or the story, which will melt you at twenty paces, or the fact that you are abundantly aware, from the first word, that Brown cares so much about his characters that I feel like he'd die before he'd sell them out. no. you won't get that review here. what you'll get, instead, is an honest plea to read a miraculous novel of blood and redemption, told by a modern Southern master- i'll go with the "accessible Faulkner" tag- that shows you how life is. lacking pretension, lacking garnish; Larry Brown lays the line out like it should be laid out- wholesome, without hamhanded proselytizing. which is magic. his gifts, nurtured in an Oxford, MI fire station, shoot honesty and magic through you like embers from a fire that you didn't set yet have to deal with- i.e., life.
joe is a mess, and his arrangement is a mess, and yet brown pulls it off. with time to spare.
magic. sheer magic.
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Title: Fay: A Novel by Larry Brown ISBN: 0743205383 Publisher: Scribner Paperback Fiction Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Dirty Work: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Larry Brown ISBN: 0679730494 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Father and Son: A Novel by Larry Brown ISBN: 0805053034 Publisher: Henry Holt (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Big Bad Love: Stories by Larry Brown ISBN: 0679734910 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: October, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Facing the Music: Stories (Front Porch Paperbacks) by Larry Brown ISBN: 1565121252 Publisher: Algonquin Books Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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