The Brave [Hardcover]

Gregory McDonald (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following Edgar-winning McDonald's hip and upbeat Flynn and Fletch series, this is a major, wrenching departure. Though he is not yet 21, Rafael is married, has three kids and lives with his extended Native American family next to a dump somewhere in the Southwest; alcoholic since boyhood, he is unemployed and faces no future. To insure, he thinks, a life "away" for his wife and kids, Rafael hires on to appear in a snuff film. After listening to the director's detailed grisly explanation of an "hour of pain" ending in death, Rafael signs a $30,000 "contract" (fake, naturally), gets $200 in cash, buys gifts for his family and returns home for his two last days. Then the real horror, that of daily poverty, takes center stage. No one knows how to cook a turkey; luxury is "powdered coffee in hot water." For these chronically unemployed people the dump, where an armed guard shoots looters, is "the main source of cash money." There is no sanitation and, worst, kids become alcoholics. Readers won't want this part of the narrative to stop because when it does, sweet, loving, desperate Rafael is on the bus to town and his "job." If McDonald meant us to get angry at an unthinking, heartless system--"The man from the government had stopped coming . . . and then the checks from the government had stopped coming and then the food stamps had stopped"--this spare, searing indictment should succeed. It is brilliant and devastating.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 215 pages
• Publisher: Barricade Books; 1st edition (November 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942637348
• ISBN-13: 978-0942637342
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #958,372 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gut-wrenching tale of love, honor ... and snuff flicks, July 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Brave (Paperback)

This gut-wrenching novel by the author of the "Fletch" mysteries opens with a poverty-stricken young father applying for the starring role in a seedy snuff flick. After a horrifying description of what will happen to him during the course of the filming (a chapter so intense that the author himself advises you to skip it if you're timid), the filmmaker's nephew takes our hero out to open the checking account into which $30,000 will be deposited for the benefit of his wife and children. Our naive hero never suspects that the filmmakers might be feeding him a line, which makes the balance of the novel all the more poignant, as he spends a final weekend with his wife and children and extended family in the squalid trailer park (situated behind a municipal dump) where they live marginal lives in virtual exile from the rest of society. Mcdonald's trademark spare prose serves this story even better than it does his lighter mysteries, letting the fill the spaces between the sentences with his own senses of dread and heartbreak. This novel is not for the faint of heart, but the brave reader will find a rich vein of love and compassion pulsing between the covers of this slim volume

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't get this out of my head, November 30, 1999

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Brave (Hardcover)

I am not a fan of Gregory McDonald's lighter fiction. I always thought it was trivial and not entertaining enough to bother with. This book, however, touched such a nerve that I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks after I read it. It is a HARD book, in the sense that the feelings it evokes are deep and visceral. I found that I wanted to put the book down frequently, just as when watching something terrible about to happen to an unsuspecting victim one might want to avert the eyes to avoid seeing the ugliness that is sure to come.

This is a powerful and heartfelt book. I can only speculate at what would make an author whose fiction is usually fluff attempt a book with such a potent and tragic theme, but he has carried it out with great skill. No one who reads this can come away unscathed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A startling surprise!, May 29, 2003

By 

RMurray847 "afilmcritic.com" (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Brave (Hardcover)

The usually fast-paced, light-on-his-feet, full of sarcasm McDonald undergoes a complete transformation here. After FLETCH, FLYNN and their offspring, I would never have expected such a wrenching and UNHAPPY book to come from this writer. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy McDonald's work. I stumbled across this book in a remainder bin and snapped it up. Read it basically in one sitting at an airport...it's a slight book, like all his others.

It is indeed wrenching. As others have said, the chapter running down the horror's our hero will endure prior to being "snuffed" on film is horrific. McDonald succeeds in making us see the world through the eyes of this EXTREMELY simple man...a man for whom life has not held any pleasure in a long, long time. We realize, even as our protagonist does not, that his family isn't going to get all the money they've been promised. His tiny glimmers of hope for a better life WILL NOT COME TO PASS, and that's the real tragedy of the story. We can almost understand how he could lay down his life for his family, with the hope of providing them something better. But to understand that this hope will be in vain and that his family will be WORSE off after he's gone makes the story almost unbearable.

There's another scene that sticks with you. The producers of the film give the Brave (he's got Indian blood...hence he's a "brave"), a little bit of money in advance, and he takes the family on a painful shopping trip to a bargain department store (like a Wal-Mart). For them, it's like giving us $10,000 bucks to spend at the Mall of the Americas. But imagine spending that money knowing you will be tortured to death soon!!!

This is not an easy book. But I can pretty much guarantee you won't have read anything like it before. I can't imagine what inspired McDonald to write a book with such a wretched world view (the life of poverty he describes for The Brave and his cohorts is squalid beyond belief), but for a few hours, we're sucked into it nonetheless. Give the book a try, if you can find it, but keep it away from the kids!!

(By the way, Johnny Depp made his directorial debut with the film version of THE BRAVE. Apparently the movie was awful...not worth a release, even. It goes for very high prices on ebay now. I'd love to see it!)