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The Heart Survives
| Article
# : |
20175 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
3,008 Words |
| Author
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Alex Standefer
Alex Standefer is managing editor of the Sewanee Review. In
1990 he returned to the South and to fiction writing after a
ten-year hiatus in New York, where his worked as a project
director for W.H. Freeman/Scientific American Books, a
freelance writer for Time Inc., and a freelance copy editor of
some forty-odd books in manuscript for Raven Press, Longman,
and others. Short stories that he wrote in his college days
appeared in The Cellar Door and The Alchemist (University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill). |
Larry Brown's new book is hard to figure. The great American novel--or plainly spoken, a great novel--it is not. Come to the end of reading it and ask yourself, Did I like it? Was it any good? Answers yes and no don't satisfy, and you pass the next few days arguing it and turning the story over in your thoughts.
You question your judgment and lose patience with your faintness of wit and resolution. What makes a good book a good book? You want to know. Surely you know that, you say. A good book is one you could recommend to friend or foe and feel you'd returned the one a favor and the other a benediction. A good book entertains--commands attention, animates the inner stage, pays off in delight. A good book keeps revolving long after it's put down, spins out tendrils of association and feeds the mind. What else? Like any prized artifacts made for use, a good book comes of a happy marriage of function and form, shows intelligence in its design and craftsmanship behind its beauties.
That about covers it, you think. You rule that Joe merits some of these descriptions, but none of them wholly. Your dentist calls you in from the waiting room and asks about the book you were carrying the week before. You attempt to tell about it in capsule, and he says, "Don't know that we need to read that one." You decide not to tell anyone else about it.
Then, if you've taken more than a couple of sittings with Joe, you notice something lacking in your day and find yourself looking around for something you feel you've put down and lost. You realize that you've gotten used to Larry Brown's voice, and you miss it.
Joe baffles because it has hard truth in it that fastens upon the mind like a treble hook. Brown's characters are inedible. They go on living long after the last page has been turned. Their lives, dogged with troubles, and their experiences, raw in the extreme, can make an uneasy host of even the hardiest imagination. Brown's people don't come to visit. They come to stay.
A taste of what the book holds in store is served up in the first pages. A family of footsore sharecroppers (resembling more a post-Armageddon tribal unit than a family) slouches toward the small town in Mississippi where Joe lives.
The old man faltered momentarily, did a drunken two-step, and collapsed slowly on the melted tar with a small grunt, easing down so as not to hurt
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