Customer Reviews

The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fictio)

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Brad Vice, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (University of Georgia, 2005)

I think at this point everyone has heard of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Not because it won the Flannery O'Connor Award last year, but because the award got yanked after it was shown that Vice had plagiarized parts of the book's opening short story, "Tuscaloosa Knights." More's the pity, because it's actually the book's weakest offering. A second allegation of plagiarism has been made for "Report from Junction," another story that comes about halfway through the collection.

None of this is actually relevant to the review, and without getting into a discussion of "fair use" which would take up far more than a thousand words, is here only for purposes of completeness. No one has yet complained that Vice lifted a complete story, whole and unbroken-- only various passages and sentences. And what makes the stories in this collection so good is the way those passages and sentences are strung together. (I have hopes that eventually Brad Vice will turn out looking like the print version of the Evolution Control Committee, the idiocy of this whole thing will go away, and the book will be reprinted.)

The simple truth of the matter is that whether a stray line in story A came from book B by another author or not, Vice has penned a wonderful batch of stories in this debut collection. Most of them are little slices of Southern life, usually Depression-era or not long after. I wondered about halfway through the collection, though, why it had picked up the O'Connor; while Vice's stories are on the whole excellent, they didn't seem quite dark enough to be worthy of bearing Ms. O'Connor's hallowed name. That, of course, changed a couple of pages after I had the thought. The book's three final stories take the collection into places of darkness and despair that it hadn't previously seen.

The title story, especially, is a corker. Set in the slightly-near future, it concerns an auto designer who's obsessed with making a black and white short film (and an amusement park ride) based on the Bear Bryant funeral train. It is obsessed with its own detail, and it treats its characters in very nasty ways. A good man is hard to find, indeed, and when you find him, you may find that you don't want him nearly as much as you thought you did.

I'd strongly recommend going and picking this up at your earliest opportunity, but the University of Georgia recalled all outstanding copies and pulped them. (They were going for as high as a thousand bucks apiece on Amazon, and may still be.) If your library is one of the few holdouts who still has a copy, I'd grab it and read it ASAP, because it's entirely possible that, otherwise, you will never get the chance. Stunning. ****

Listen: the book is awesome. A bunch of people who didn't understand the literary strategy of the book got real upset and railroaded the hardcover edition out of print. That was a shame, and the shame was not on Brad Vice. It was a big huge loss, too, because these stories are damn good, and they don't read the same way as some of the sources upon which a couple of them are based.

Brad Vice, by now, ought to be enjoying the rewards good work brings. I hope, at least, he's enjoying the good work itself, as I have been again this week. I give The Bear Bryant Funeral Train my strongest recommendation, and my bookshelves are holding a few spots open for future Brad Vice books.

Yes, there is some controversy about this little book, but discerning readers should not let that take away from the brilliance of other stories around which there is no controversy. The chapters on "Chickensnake" and "Mules" are brilliant. Truly brilliant. Others border on brilliance as well. Combined with Bobby Dews' collection of short stories "Legends, Demons and Dreams," you have the best of Southern fiction today. Forget the controversy. Read the book. It's well worth it. So is Bobby Dews' book.

This book, "The Bear Bryant Funeral Train", the author's first, was removed from every bookstore shortly after publication, due to the discovery that the short story entitled "Tuscaloosa Knights" contained many sections that were, by the author's own admission, "heavily borrowed" from Carl Carmer's 1934 work, "Tuscaloosa Nights." "The Bear Bryant Funeral Train" won the highly coveted Flannery O'Connor Award, which usually rockets a young writer into a successful literary career, but which, in this sad case, very likely has ended a career just as it was beginning.

Because the publisher withdrew every copy from stores and destroyed all the copies, then withdrew the award from Mr. Vice, only a handful of copies remain, making this first-edition volume the key collector's item in the Flannery O'Connor series. Without a doubt, it will be worth many thousands of dollars in years to come. The publisher quietly removed all copies from stores before announcing that it was pulping the book--thus, very very few copies have actually made it into circulation.

All of this is truly a sad development, as the material that was not plagiarized is quite brilliant. I hope that Mr. Vice, who is being investigated on ethics charges at the university where he teaches, will be able to survive this unhappy event and go on to have the chance to publish another first book--this time one that he has written entirely on his own.

The University of Georgia Press has issued a recall on all of these books and rescinded the Flannery O'Connor Award based upon an intensely narrow-minded accusation of plagiarism. THIS IS ONLY AN ALLEGATION. Rather than correct what was obviously an editorial oversight on their part, the UGA Press has decided to unfairly punish Brad Vice. If you find a copy of this book, BUY IT. If you own a copy of this book, KEEP IT. Read it, re-read it, and tell your friends about it. Do not let UGA Press bully a fine writer and his appreciative and intelligent readers. Find out how much Brenn Jones of the SF Chronicle liked it at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/23/RVGC9F7EK51.DTL&type=books

Even though there's not much football in this book, these stories pack the punch of Johnny Musso powering through the Vanderbilt defensive line. Roll Tide Roll!!