THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609230249
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. MCAVOY
LENGTH: 69 lines
FATHER AND SON
LARRY BROWN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 360 pp. $22.95.
With the publication of six books in the past eight years, Larry Brown has become one of the nation's most prolific and celebrated authors. Noted for his ``unflinching honesty'' and ``gritty style,'' as critics attest, he is that rare writer who can claim both critical and commercial success. His awards include the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature for his short story collection, ``Facing the Music,'' and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for his novel Joe. His memoir On Fire enjoyed a brief but lucrative tour on several best-seller lists in 1993.
With Father and Son, Brown has extended the boundaries of his creative reach, producing a work of raw and frightening power. Certain to enhance his reputation, this competent, though imperfect, novel is testimony to a daring voice in American letters. Brown proves both willing and capable of challenging apathy, compelling notice and demanding that we, as individuals and a culture, finally accept responsibility for who and what we have become.
Set in rural Mississippi in 1968, Father and Son recounts Glen Davis' return to his hometown after three years in prison for vehicular homicide. Glen's conviction and sentence have done little - short of steeling his rage - to change him, and the ensuing five days are as violent as the best of Shakespearean tragedy.
Haunted by the accidental shooting of his brother when he was a child and the death of his mother while he was in prison, Glen smolders with hatred for his father, Virgil Davis, the cause, he believes, of both his torment and his brother's death. Withdrawn and without conscience, he directs his anger against the town around him and leaves the Mississippi landscape littered with the broken corpses of his twisted and bitter acts. His refusal to marry Jewel, the woman who has waited faithfully for his return, and to acknowledge his illegitimate son David is the least of his transgressions. Larceny, two rapes and three murders in less than a week are among his worst.
The only obstacle in Glen's destructive path is Sheriff Bobby Blanchard, a hard-working and decent man. Though he doesn't know it, Bobby is Virgil's illegitimate son, and thus a constant reminder of his infidelity and an object of Glen's jealousy and disgust. He is unlike Glen in every way but one: He, too, is in love with Jewel. As Glen focuses his rage on a single, symbolic victim, a final act of vengeance, he and Bobby become locked in a struggle for life and death, a battle from which no victor may emerge.
As always, Brown's prose is simple and unadorned, a frame under which are barely concealed the viscera of agony and destiny. His characters teem with life unfulfilled. They breathe the stench of real pain. Brown's world is dark and violent, stunningly real and devastatingly powerful.
Still, this power is limited. His characters, so clearly good or evil, teeter dangerously close to caricature. His exploration of the troubled mind veers perilously near predictability. And his landscape that churns and rages as evil follows evil is almost unforgivably derivative of Flannery O'Connor's distinctive style. That Brown is able to rescue his novel from these potentially fatal flaws is a credit to his skill and maturity as a writer.
These limitations do not prevent Father and Son from being a significant and deeply moral work. Behind its thinly disguised symbols of good and evil, its over-the-counter explanations of psychosis and its all-too-knowing landscape, there lurks a truth. A man need not be bound by the past. He has a choice. He is ultimately and singularly responsible for the good or evil he brings into the world.
This is the stuff of great literature. And though Father and Son falls short of greatness, it is provocative and eminently humane. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk. by CNB