Reviewed by M. Dale Jones
In 1991, after his masterful collection of stark, humorous, and
fiercest stories, Big Bad Love, Larry Brown released his
second novel, Joe: A Novel. More so than his first novel (Dirty
Work), Joe brought together the great themes and the rich
environment that would typify this work: The struggle with poverty
or barely making your way from job to job; the struggle between
decency and outright evil; and, the inner struggle to resist the
forces to implode in furies of self-destruction.
In Joe, Brown has fully formed his unique lyrical and spare
voice and has breathed life into characters that are so real the
reader leaves the novel with the impression that they have met Joe
Ransom, Gary Jones and know low-down dogs like Wade Jones, Gary’s
father. We recognize in Wade, like Faulkner’s Anse Bundren, the
father-figure whose whole being is bent on an entirely selfish
objective that is typically achieved through the exploitation and
destruction of their children. Whether after teeth, a wife,
alcohol, or money, the unsuppressed desire of the father sets both
Faulkner’s and Brown’s novel into action.
We are first introduced to the chronically
homeless and fleeing Jones family, Wade, Mama, Fay, Gary, and
Dorothy wondering from Oklahoma to Florida back to Mississippi
through highways and country by-roads in sojourn to an old familiar
place that Wade remembers from his younger years. As his family
suffers from excruciating depravation, Wade’s unchallenged desire
for alcohol is pathetically apparent. As they walk the highway, Wade
finds a couple unopened can of Budweiser and joyfully/miserly hogs
them to himself. The chapter ends with the industrious Gary
finding an abandoned house/cabin that quickly becomes the residence
of the Wade Jones Family.
In the next chapter, we are introduced to the Joe Ransom, a forty
something ex-convict whose job entails poisoning trees (clearing the
land) for a lumber company. Joe’s wife left him after years of
living with his gambling, drinking, and carousing. He has got a
couple of children whom he rarely sees; drives a broken down truck;
keeps a pit bull to guard his house; has a girlfriend, Connie,
roughly the age of his own daughter; and has an ongoing feud with
several of the degenerate locals (chiefly Willie Russell). His
independent mentality of self-reliance and suspicions of the local
authorities comes through as an ‘authority complex’ that repeatedly
threatens to have him return to prison. But, his outlook also
promises the hope of redemption because of his awareness of his
limitation, faults and sense of right or order.
The intersection of Joe and Gary forms the stories central
understanding of the relentlessness of evil and the hope of
redemption in sacrificial caring for another person. In between
Wade steals, connives, and even kills as he embarks on a perpetual
quest for another jug of liquor and a pack of smokes. He dominates
by terror the entire Jones family with such violence that the
eighteen-year-old daughter, Fay, flees the house and family to seek
a life (Fay: A Novel). Gary stays with his Mama and Dorothy
out of a sense of misguided loyalty. Though he cannot read or
write, Gary becomes the primary wage earner in the family and begins
working for Joe poisoning trees in the woods. A bond in formed
between Gary and Joe, between a form of innocence and a dreaming or
longing for innocence in the form of making things right by doing
something really right for someone unable to save themselves;
redemption.
As the novel draws to the showdown between Wade and his radical
exploitation of everyone, particularly his family, to satisfy his
basest desires and Joe’s vicarious salvation through his ennobled
protection of Gary, the world of moral ambiguity is quickened and
solidified against the violence against innocence. Joe’s sense of
what is right and what must happen propels him found with the power
and justification of a ‘fated’ act. He acts not from a place of
puritanical moral purity, but from the grayness of his own moral
compass that allows for complete clarity as he sees the lives of
Gary and Dorothy threatened with a violence of grotesques magnitude.
Joe
ends as it began. Nothing is resolved. No one has escaped the pain
of life or even the pain inflicted by individuals bent on their own
desires without consideration or care for those around. Wade, a
master of the art of using people as a means toward his own end,
poisons people at their roots or base so that he can control them in
their weakness. Like the poisoned trees, everyone has been damaged
and will not stand long. Fay has fled, Gary returns to his Mama
with a traumatized Dorothy, and Gary is left to settle matters in
violence. All that is innocent is damaged. All that is free is
bound. All that is withheld is taken by force, violated and
destroyed.
Larry Brown’s Joe stands at the beginning of his amazing and
too brief career as a gateway to the moral complexity and flawed
realism of the world we inhabit. No one’s motives are pure. No act
is without self-service or self-gain. Even Joe’s sacrifice is
framed within the larger context of a countdown to his return to
prison due to his anti-authoritarian mentality. One knows, doesn’t
one, that Joe was going, eventually, back to prison. Yet, his
decision ennobles and redeems him nevertheless. Brown reaches for
no easy solutions or convenient resolutions. Joe’s painful
realism, which depicts characters as flawed, struggling agents of
their own lives, disallows anything but authenticity and integrity
in understanding actions and consequences. We are the wiser who
benefit from Brown’s deeply philosophical novel whose moral
complexity reads like a Camus of the American South.
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