Father and Son (1996) is a novel by American writer Larry Brown. It received the 1997 Southern Book Award for Fiction.[1][2] Brown’s previous novel Joe (1991) also received the same award, making him the first two-time winner.[3][4]
 original dust jacket | |
| Author | Larry Brown (Author) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Algonquin Books |
Publication date | 1996 |
| Publication place | USA |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 360 |
| ISBN | 9781565120143 |
Brief synopsis
editGlen Davis serves 3 years in Parchman Prison for killing a child in a drunk driving incident. After serving his time, Glen returns to his Mississippi hometown where he terrorizes, or seeks vengeance on, those he believes have wronged him in the past.[4][5]
Principal characters
edit- Glen Davis — a convict just released from the state penitentiary
- Randolph “Puppy” Davis — Glen's younger brother
- Virgil Davis — Glen's and Puppy's father, prisoner of war in Bataan during World War II
- Mary Blanchard — Virgil's lover
- Bobby Blanchard — the sheriff, Mary's son
- Jewel — the mother of Glen's young son[5]
Background
editAt the time of its publication in 1996, Father and Son was Brown's third published novel and his sixth book to have appeared over the previous eight years.[6] It followed after his first two published novels: Dirty Work (1988) and Joe (1992); two story collections: Facing the Music (1988) and Big Bad Love (1991); and the “short haunting memoir” On Fire (1993).[5][n 1]
Brown wrote about how he first conceptualized the setting of the novel:
“When I wrote my novel Father and Son, people wondered why I set it back in the sixties. The answer to that is very simple. When I wrote the first scene, where Glen Davis and his brother Puppy are driving back into town, I didn’t see the Square I see now […] I saw that old Oxford […] and I knew that they had driven in one hot Saturday afternoon back during my childhood, and I remember the way things were.”[7]
Setting and themes
editFather and Son is set in 1968 in and around Oxford, Mississippi including nearby Tula and Paris.[4] Like he did in the fiction he published before Father and Son, Brown uses:
“the basic settings, speech, and themes of traditional Southern fiction — the tangled loyalties of family and community, the pressures of history, soul-grinding poverty and economic struggle, and Southerners’ visceral bond with the land…”[5]
Reception and legacy
editAt the time of its publication, Publishers Weekly gave Father and Son unqualified praise calling it Brown's “most wise, humane and haunting work to date.”[8] Kirkus Reviews called it a “riveting tale of an unforgiving and cruel world.”[9]
Anthony Quinn, in his review for The New York Times, found the book to be a “commendable novel short of being a flat-out success,” but acknowledged that Brown had established a distinct voice and vision of his own: “The model is William Faulkner, but his influence has been absorbed and transcended: the cumulative effect of this blue-collar tragedy proves it the work of a writer absolutely confident of his own voice.”[10] Writing in The Virginian-Pilot, Eugene McAvoy muted his praise of the novel, calling it a “competent, though imperfect, novel” but it is “testimony to a daring voice in American letters.”[6]
In the decades since Father and Son came out, it has been recognized by some as a watershed moment for Brown, “almost Shakespearean in its dramatic scope and the larger questions it raises.”[5][n 2] More than 25 years after the novel first appeared in 1996, popular crime-writer Ace Atkins was asked about the scenes of violence in Father and Son. Atkins replied,
“That’s great Southern noir. It’s grotesque, it’s violent, it’s absurd. I think that Larry brought back some of those darker elements to Southern literature that maybe had been eroded since the time of Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner. This is a place that was founded in violence and slavery and brutality, and the ripple effects are still with us. And Larry was very well-aware of that.”[4]
Notes
edit- ^ As Carol Dale Short explains: “On Fire is Brown’s memoir about the seventeen years he spent as a fireman and emergency rescue technician in the hometown he shares with William Faulkner: Oxford, Mississippi”
- ^ Carroll Dale Short writes that: “Like Pete Dexter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Paris Trout (1988), it moves readers to look past the conventional concept of law and order and consider the role of each individual in a community that is openly threatened by such a criminal.”
References
edit- ^ Conversations with Larry Brown. University Press of Mississippi. (Publisher’s Page). Archived from the original on 2023-06-04.
- ^ "Father and Son". Goodreads.
- ^ "Larry Brown". Hachette Book Group: Publisher’s page. January 9, 2023.
- ^ a b c d "The Backlist: Revisiting Larry Brown's 'Father and Son' with Ace Atkins". February 2, 2023.
- ^ a b c d e Short, Carroll Dale, “Father and Son”; Magill’s Literary Annual 1997 (June 1997)
- ^ a b "Brown mines Good, Evil Between Father and Son". scholar.lib.vt.edu.
- ^ Brown, Larry (April 2001). Billy Ray's Farm. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. p. 2. ISBN 978-1-56512-709-8.
- ^ "Father and Son by Larry Brown". Publisher’s Weekly.
- ^ "FATHER AND SON | Kirkus Reviews". Kirkus Reviews. July 20, 1996 – via www.kirkusreviews.com.
- ^ Quinn, Anthony (22 September 1996). "The Summer of Hate". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2018-01-28.