Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992 TAG: 9201190209
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by MATTHEW CHITTUM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`JOE' A WHISKEY-STAIN VISION OF NEW SOUTH
JOE. By Larry Brown. Algonquin Books. $19.95.Larry Brown feeds his readers details with an eyedropper, dribbling them out with amazing patience, and yet squeezing just fast enough to keep the tongue moist and craving more. In "Joe" he keeps us thirsty for details of the ugly, violent new South, a place where seemingly nothing is free of whiskey stains.
Brown's Mississippi is a whole world of bourbon and brawls, of vagrants and criminals, of shiftless scum and poor white trash, where work is often only as important as the next bottle, and sometimes not even that important.
The novel opens with a landscape as knotted and barren as the moral landscape of the figures that inhabit it. Wade Jones, his wife, two daughters (one pregnant) and son trudge across a bland expanse on the way back to Wade's former home. Wade is an alcoholic and criminal whose crimes fester and bloat in severity from shoplifting to sheer atrocities as the novel progresses.
Not until the second chapter do we meet Joe Ransom, the title character, who awakens to one more glass of bourbon at five a.m. Like Wade, he is an alcoholic, as well as a compulsive though successful gambler. Joe leads a violent life and is no stranger to bullets or the state penitentiary. Yet he is conscientious and driven by a strong sense of morality and his own ideas of justice. Though his marriage has fallen victim to his drinking, he has managed to keep in line with the law and runs his own lucrative clear-cutting business.
Brown develops these two characters on parallel storylines, which finally collide and bleed together when Wade's son, Gary, goes to work for Joe. Unlike his father, Gary is hard-working, impeccably moral but terribly naive.
Joe struggles to give something of worth to Gary - love, a pickup truck, a warm beer - while trying to keep Wade from taking it away. At the same time, he has to keep his own sense of justice from crossing wires with the local law. As Wade's crimes against Gary and others become more appalling, Joe's hatred of of the boy's father grows stronger.
"Joe" is a novel of amazing depth and breadth that functions on multiple levels. Brown treats the inescapable subject of alcoholism with appropriate sobriety and even darkness (no immorality in this novel is far from an open bottle), while at the same time wrenching laughs from the reader.
"Joe" is also a novel deeply rooted in the traditions of Southern literature, and Gary seems not too distantly related to Huck Finn. When a prostitute asks him, "You ain't ever done this before, have you?" Gary replies, "Done what?" Comparisons to Faulkner are also inevitable.
But for all comparisons, Larry Brown has a fullness of vision and complexity of character development that are uniquely his. They will earn him and this novel a place next to the likes of Twain and Faulkner, not at their feet.
Matthew Chittum teaches English at Virginia Western Community College.