Customer Reviews

Brown Harvest

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a very unusual novel, but one that I found to be very funny and really entertaining. It's a kind of parody of about a zillion different things - especially kid detectives like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew - but it's a lot richer than most parodies, with some really interesting things to say about growing up and getting wise to the things that really matter in life. The plot which I believe is a close parody of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, is a little bit crazy, but in a good way and the dialogue is a blast. Lots of familiar characters from childhood turn up in almost every chapter and it's a lot of fun trying to identify them all. "Los Bros Robusto" - a disguised, crazed version of the Hardy Boys - were my favorites, along with a certain curious (and kinky) monkey and a man in a yellow hat. This is definitely not a run of the mill book and one which deserves some attention. I loved it.

What goes up must come down, the saying goes, and Jay Russell has imagined a world in which all our childhood heroes have done just that, not simply reaching Earth, but bypassing it and sinking more deeply into the mire than I would have thought possible.

Deconstructionism and continuation have been a part of literature, almost as long as there has been literature. New authors with new ideas use the ideas, words and characters of old authors in order to illuminate the present or make some other kind of statement. Witness "The New Testament", "The Wide Sargasso Sea", "The Wind Done Gone", "Paradise Lost" or any Sherlock Holmes pastiche to see what I mean. Sometimes these attempts are profound; mostly they are dull and add nothing. Then there's "Brown Harvest", which is both a tongue-in-cheek update to Hammet's "Red Harvest" and a continuation of the stories of nearly every child detective you ever read. Ch*rry Ames is here, as are D*nny Dunne, J*piter Jones and the H*ppy H*llisters. The H*rdy Boys are major characters. So are B*gs Meany and Curious Ge*rge. But the story truly belongs to the smartest kid in Id(e)aville, *ncycl*p*d** Br*wn.

Yes, I've hidden the identities of these characters, just as Russell did, to protect their memories. In Russell's mean streets, nothing good ever happens to a fictional character when he grows up. These once-pure literary entities are now alcoholics, drug-addicts, prostitutes, wastrels, murderers, crooks and sodomites. If you loved these characters, then learning how they turned out will break your heart.

Fortunately, this is only one possible ending for these kids and I'd like to think that other books, as yet unwritten, hold a brighter future for them. But that's another matter entirely.

The story looesly follows its hard-boiled inspiration, "Red Harvest", in that a lone man enters a town gone wild, run by three opposing gangs (in this case, violent software companies). Each gang hires the loner who, in turn, begins turning the gangs against one another in order to force them to wipe the others out. The goal is to gain revenge and be the last man standing.

Jay Russell is a sly and unflinching reporter, able to bring both humor and pathos to nearly every paragraph. I did find myself laughing out loud and relating the plot or dialog to my friends (most of whom never read the originals, sadly). But on nearly every page I also felt a piece of my childhood die when I saw what Russell had done to my beloved childhood friends. This is not a book for sentimentalists or the faint of heart.
But if you can stomach it, this is a hell of an entertaining book, one that will keep you reading, keep you guessing, keeping you rummaging through the attic to retrieve those relics of the past and read them again, to assure yourself they are still as they were.

And if you get a chance, read Jay Russell's "Marty Burns" series. This book led me in that direction and I'm now a huge fan.

This is an unusual page-turner in which a ridiculous number of characters from kid's fiction enact a hard-boiled detective novel (the plot similarities to Hammett's Red Harvest are particularly marked). (...) to mention the other obvious primary source for the story, I will only say this: Roach Blackwell=Bugs Meaney. If you know who Bugs is, and you appreciate dark humor, you will enjoy this book.

This is an unusual page-turner in which a ridiculous number of characters from kid's fiction enact a hard-boiled detective novel (the plot similarities to Hammett's Red Harvest are particularly marked). Since all the reviewers so far seem reluctant to mention the other obvious primary source for the story, I will only say this: Roach Blackwell=Bugs Meaney. If you know who Bugs is, and you appreciate dark humor, you will enjoy this book.

This book is a gigantic kick for anybody who grew up reading about the adventures of Francisco and Jose Robusto, or about the Old Keene Mansion on Drew Hill, or about... well, about a certain Boy Detective we all appear reluctant to mention by name.

Is this a copywrite thing?

ANOTHER brilliant book by Jay Russell
This guy should be on the best sellers list....
He's that good...

This is the epitome of a high-concept book, and it unfortunately attempts to skate by on the concept alone. The concept is a fun one -- but it's not enough to make up for the weak writing, the lame jokes, the incoherent plot, the introduction of distracting quasi-cyberpunk elements into the story, and the juvenile attempts to shock. The author is too much in love with his own cleverness, and his idea of funny involves naming streets in his city "Geisel Lane" (after Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss) or "Franklin Street" and "Dixon Lane" (after the pseudonymous author of the Hardy Boys books). Many of the gags are on par with a bad Mad magazine piece, and some don't even make sense (why, exactly, do the Hardy Boys pretend to be Hispanic? obviously the real answer is that this enables the author to skirt intellectual property complaints by calling them "Robusto" instead of "Hardy" -- but in the context of the story it really makes no sense at all).

Sadly, even the jokes that do work get on your nerves after a while, since they all amount to basically the same joke told over and over ("Look! I just referred to another kidlit author or character! Remember that one?") And if you try to look beyond the jokes, you can't -- as they say, there's no there there.

So what that leaves is 340 pages of winking in-jokes, clunky prose, some really bad sex writing, and about 3 pages worth of genuine wit. As a 3-page piece in The New Yorker, this concept could've been a winner. But this hypertrophic treatment is a huge disappointment.