Customer Reviews

Fay: A Novel

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Larry Brown's FAY is absolutely incredible. This is the "big book" his fans have been waiting for. Picking up on the character of Fay Jones as she exited his novel JOE, Brown has created something most unexpected--a living, breathing female main character that pulses with the same intensity his male characters always have. You don't have be familiar with JOE to dive into FAY (but I'd recommend JOE as a fabulous read as well), as Fay's story stands on its own quite well. All the elements of Brown's other books are here: the drinking, the killing, the aimless riding around in Mississippi's lovely countryside--but his handling of Fay's character is especially tender this time around and what happens to her will hurt you in ways you won't expect. Yes, it's long. And yes, it's a bit slower paced than Brown's other novels. But it's a doozy of a book that should earn the author his first National Book Award nomination. Buy it now!

One word best describes Larry Brown's writing: brutal. The north Mississippi writer's latest work of fiction, "Fay," is filled with characters, events and pain which amplify the everyday brutality of many lower-class whites in Mississippi. Of course in writing about these increasingly marginalized women and men, Brown also says much about all of us: who we are, who we love, who we hate and what it means to live and to die as Southerners. Along the way, Larry Brown also tells one fine story.

"Fay" is one of those novels that you should read on a deck or a dock, maybe in the sand at the beach, with a six-pack of cold, cheap beer next to you. Read a few pages, take a sip. Think about what it is you've read.

After 489 pages, you'll shake your head in disbelief at Fay Jones and the lives she brightens, enlightens and ends. "That can't be. Who are these people? What are they thinking? This isn't real." But it is. And that's the beauty - and gift - of Larry Brown: He tells the truth from the darkest of our hearts.

This is a compelling story about a young innocent finding her way through Mississippi circa 1985, before the casinos took over the Gulf Coast. With Fay, Brown has created an engaging heroine who is thoroughly believable. Her journey from backwoods shacks to strip joints, from paternal abuse to true love, pregnancy and tragic loss is moving, often hilarious and unforgettable. Male authors rarely create believable female characters, which is not the case with Fay. The supporting characters are deftly drawn and include a kindly couple (a highway patrolman and his alcoholic wife) who offer Fay shelter, a sexy but dangerous strip club bouncer who falls hard for Fay and his slimy, womanizing half-brother. Despite her tender age (17) and fifth grade education, Fay has an amazing instinct for survival which helps her escape several perilous situations. This book was so incredible that I gobbled it down in two days. "Fay" is a thrilling page-turner that is also a beautifully written, poignant tale. It was my first introduction to Larry Brown and I'm so grateful that I found it. I strongly recommend this book to readers who appreciate fine writing as well as those seeking a great original story. If readers like this book, they should also check out two other fine books by Brown: "Big Bad Love," a tremendous collection of short stories, and "Father and Son," another novel.

Nobody writes about rednecks and Southern rogues better than Larry Brown. In this big, ambitious book he charts a new variant on previous work, giving the reader a sprawling tale of the down-and-out on the Gulf Coast which focuses primarily on a female. There are plenty of the 'good ole boys' that one expects of Brown in ths picaresque tale, but it is Fay's story. Naturally beautiful and sexy, seventeen year old Fay is also dumber than a sack of nails and about as passive. She comes by her ignorance honestly, since she has no real education and has been raised in abject poverty in a family of migrant workers. Walking away from a life she hates and fears into a world she knows nothing about, she becomes a lightning rod for trouble. Mostly man trouble. From initial encounters with a truckload of drunken young men she progresses through a series of 'adventures' that quickly become entangled in one another. By the end of the story there is a trail of wreckage from Oxford to Gulf Shores that includes damaged and dead bodies, destroyed lives and lost hope.

Fay is a complex character and her story, while disturbing, rings true. There is tragedy here but there is also a good deal of simple humanity. Fay can be a tough lady when she has to be, but she has a fundamental sweet side that makes her an easy mark. The reader keeps wanting to scream, "NO, don't do it" - knowing full well that she will, will then regret it and have no idea how to make it OK. True life.

I enjoyed this book as much as anything I have read in ages. It isn't a pleasant book, but characters like Aaron and his brother, though ugly, are quite real. One of the things I liked best about this novel was Brown's choice to shift the point of view from player to player, so that we see the story from the eyes of many characters as it unfolds.

Anyone wanting a honest, tough, uncompromising look at humans on the edge should read this book. I highly recommend it.

Fay walks a lot. That's what Fay does. She walks and lights cigarettes. Fay drinks beer and tosses empty cans. And then she walks some more. On a road. And this is how Larry Brown writes about Fay. Walking. On a road. Walking. A lot. Despite this overwrought attempt at Hemingway simplicity, Fay is still an exceptional novel. The style is forgotten quickly as the plot unravels in seedy, rural Mississippi. Larry Brown's book is a quick read that sways from one side of a country road to the other - blindly speeding and turning when least expected. It's an engaging story of starting over, coming of age and sexual discovery. Fay Jones is a determined, endearing girl who wants a better life. She walks away from paternal abuse and searches for anything better. She is a backwoods teenager unaware of her feminine beauty, and she discovers her sexual appeal the hard way. It's a country mouse goes to the city and finds Larry Flynt kind of tale - a classic bildungsroman with a touch of Penthouse Forum. Using language and landscape, Larry Brown effectively paints the South in which Fay travels. His characters are well developed, and their rural southern dialect is natural and unstrained. Brown doesn't exaggerate southern conversation - a hurdle many authors can't clear. His southern scenery is also accurate, with its kudzu jungles, high humidity and shrimp trawlers. The song of salt air blowing through sailboat rigging accompanies seabirds' cries and early-morning dock sounds. It's Shem Creek in Biloxi. All you need is boiled peanuts. If anything in Fay is contrived, however, it's the non-stop coffee, beer and cigarettes - there's always one or the other in everyone's hand. Nearly every page has a pot brewing, a beer opening or cigarettes burning. It's a relief when the hash pipes appear, just for a change of pace.

Fay is a mixture of Deliverance, On the Road and Rabbit, Run - a backwoods journey of an everyman heroine, who endures rape, murder and lost love. A story filled with substance abuse and altered states, Fay captures southern society's underbelly in a provocative and heartfelt way. Trailers, bars and old houses fill Larry Brown's Mississippi, which overflows with cops, strippers and criminals. Overall, Fay is a straightforward, compelling book. Subplots are sparse, but the central story is engaging entertainment. It has appealing characters and a rapid rhythm. Fay Jones is a character to root for, and Fay is a novel worth reading. What else would you expect from a Chapel Hill publishing company founded by a Charleston native? For further information, visit www.algonquin.com and for more of the Jones clan, read Larry Brown's prequel, Joe.

Catches you early with a strong start. Sputters. Then seems to idle-down into a slow haul until something outrageous happens. Then the pace and writing picks up, sputters, and idles down again. And the cycle repeats. And then again. And again. Finally things get so twisted and messed up that the author throws together a final melee and wraps things up. Close the book, pick up another.

This fast and slow pace describes both the rhythms of the plot and of the characters running across the pages of this rather bleak, but well-told story. But even with some dreary downtime, you will be amazed at what can happen in one week. Runaways, pedophiles, and rapists murder and rape each other while drinking, stripping, and slutting through the seemingly ubiquitous bars and trailer parks of southern Mississippi. Then to give a nice context for all of this wholesome fun, fate turns against the troubled protagonists by tossing in nasty car wrecks and a gasoline tanker explosion. What will you do? People are born to die and it simply isn't a good idea to be within 100 miles of these folks if you want to steer clear of that fact.

All the beer drinking, bad behavior, and stupid choices filling the pages of this book might make you turn against the characters involved -- or bore you -- but you don't really end up hating anyone or getting all that bored. That, I think, is a good sign; a sign that the story is well-told, perhaps. But ever-present beer drinking, bad behavior, and stupid choices still becomes monotonous, detatching us from the lives we're reading about. It's almost other-worldly, as in, where are the people I know? I suppose that could be the point. A bit of overkill (literally and otherwise), but it does work to bury most people into a side of life that's down the road, on the outskirts of town; a reality, that if we had to experience it, we might want to cast aside as a surreality.

Oh, yeah, Fay. Our lead character. Well, the novel really is less about her than it is about what she roams through. The story and its menagerie literally uses and rides Fay from one seedy scene to the next. Eventually it comes to an end, but without any real resolution, confirming what the book has been about from page one: A world without Good and Evil. In a general everyday sense, I think we need use a sense of Good and Evil to identify and attach to literary characters, perhaps as we probably do in non-literary life, but this novel doesn't obligate us to that chore. There is no sense of justice, no judgmental resolution, and closing those loose ends just wouldn't be any fun. A sequel would ruin everything.

Larry Brown illuminates the underside of human nature like few authors can; his characters read like sin with a soul. The style of Fay is raw and ingenuous, the pace at once plodding and breakneck. In Fay Brown sticks a knife in your thigh and waits until you can almost forget about it, then he twists it with unrelenting ferocity. Fay is the stuff of human life, in Brown's traditional plain language. Read it.

I am a native Mississippian who spent his teen years in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, where Larry Brown is from. I had heard his accolades and the story of his unlikely transition from local fireman with a high school education to respected writer for years, and I had also read some excerpts from his work that made me want to read his books. Maybe it's because I now live in California, where current Southern writers are a distant novelty, but somehow I did not read 'Fay', my first Larry Brown novel, until this summer.

I also had heard a lot of hype from some of my more literary friends in the South, so my expectations were high.

Short version--this is not a great book, or even a very good book, in many respects. It is repetitive, the lead character is not well established or clearly defined, at least one of the plot points is startlingly bad, and the book is just long...and boring. I defy you to find one scene in this 500 page book where each character is not smoking or drinking or both, and described by the writer in detail every single time--to the point that it is almost comical.

This book is nothing more than a paperback novel by a writer with better than average descriptive skills. What a disappointment.

But....

In my same order I also received "Joe", which is a sort of prequel to "Fay". Within the first few pages "Joe " establishes itself as solid literature, and it maintains that level throughout the book. It's hard to believe this is by the same author who wrote "Fay".

I have seen other great writers (Larry McMurtray comes to mind) who have written books with big gaps in quality. "Fay" is one of those books. If you haven't read Larry Brown, don't start with this one.

Unlike Brown's previous work where he cuts right to the bone (especially in the fantastic "Joe") this work is fraught with a million useless uninteresting details leaving the reader sifting for meaningful information. If there is any to be found, which I have my doubts about. Title should have been "Lonely Middle Aged Man Looks for Sweet Young Thing for Sympathy and Sex". Except for the sex he could've just gotten a dog.

Having a character walk out of one novel and into another is probably one of the most unique plot devices I've seen. Brown takes us back to the underbelly of Mississippi life in this sequel to JOE. Bobbie Ann Mason once said that writing a novel is like laying pipe. Well, Brown lays a lot of pipe in this one. And although he never overwrites a character or a scene, the plot does become a bit tedious in a few places, something that's never happened in a Brown novel. From what I understand, the original manuscript was a monster.

The tension and suspense that he developed in FATHER AND SON serves Brown well this time. The inevitable collision of forces as represented by key characters will hurl you through the final chapters. It is a "last man standing" conclusion that you're not likely to forget.

The greatest accomplishment, however, is the fully developed title character. Fay is Brown's ultimate "buddy character," sure to draw reader sympathy. But, she is as tough as any male character that may have dominated his previous pages. Most of all, she is a survivalist, surviving the wilderness of strip joints and trailer parks, gravitating toward the kindness of complex strangers.

Rumor has it that FAY is the middle book in a trilogy. Readers can only hope.