Fay: A Novel
by Larry BrownAlgonquin Books, 504 pp., $24.95
When 17-year-old Fay Jones walked out of the woodlands of rural Mississippi in the middle of Larry Brown’s novel Joe she knew only two things for certain: Her purse contained two wrinkled dollar bills and her father would not have a third opportunity to put his hands around her throat in the dark of night. And when she reappears as the protagonist of Brown’s new novel Fay, she has only just begun her trek down a road paved with equal parts asphalt and metaphor.
Fay ran away from a ramshackle and valueless home that had provided no insight into life’s ways, no nurturing that could serve as an emotional ballast when times got tough. The newer, bigger world Fay entered was a revelation populated by people and things that didn’t even exist in her dreams — power boats, big cars, handsome men and women drifting through expensive restaurants. And, of all the lessons she would learn, the very first would prove most enduring: Fay learned that her face and figure had the power to freeze men in their tracks and that this could more than compensate for her naiveté and lack of sophistication. With no other resources at her disposal, her wiles and manipulations became the key to her survival.
Fay, the novel, is the kudzu-draped odyssey of a young woman whose desperation flight has left her rootless and directionless. Her travels, to be measured in their epic range of emotion — not distance — are eventful in ways that were unimaginable when her life’s prospects were defined by the horizons of her dirt-poor upbringing. With no other force to guide her, Fay’s drifting life becomes defined by the men who engage her attentions — some physically, some romantically, some accidentally. Too soon, she discovers that good men have a bad side and that bad men have a worse side. And so, though this is Fay’s story, she is also a mirror for the men who fall into her sway. The cop cheating on his wife, the two-bit lothario who attempts rape in a parked van, the topless bar owner who practices the twisted notion that degrading behavior somehow equals love. They are all chapters in The Education of Fay Jones. Things remain rough around the edges for Fay, even when things are at their very best.
Fay is wholly a Southern story. The sights, sounds, and language of Mississippi, Georgia, and the Redneck Riviera inhabit every square inch of the tale. This is not a gentrified South or even a Jimmy Carter South. This is the mean, coarse-mouthed, gravel-road South — it has its equivalents everywhere in the world — where hungry kids get smacked around as prelude to their development into angry young adults with a world of problems that booze, dope, and lackluster crime just don’t seem to solve. It’s a place that never admits enough air or light to nurture the growth of anything good or decent. There is no romance to be found. Few other writers capture the claustrophobia of petty failure so well. The urban counterpart would be Richard Price’s Clockers.
Larry Brown’s writing is beyond seductive — it’s addictive and nearly narcotic. His spare lines ring clear as single bell notes. Linked together they are hypnotic and alluring. With great economy of motion — no flash, no pretense — he draws the reader into a story where death, sex, and betrayal (all found in abundance) are commonplace as a cold beer in an ice cooler or a pulled pork sandwich at a roadside stand. Fay is revealed in frighteningly intimate detail — the teenager with the budding libido whose ambitions accelerate from zero to monstrous in the blink of an eye. She matters to us enormously because, dammit, she deserves a better hand than she’s been dealt. And if she’s behaved badly, even criminally, who would have acted better under the circumstances?
A cult of celebrity is bound to envelop Larry Brown — sooner than later. Time will tell how the fame and fortune that he so richly deserves will change him. But for now, he has fashioned a novel that exudes danger. It’s a vicarious thrill ride for the armchair adventurer. Like motoring a stolen Harley to a roadhouse for a high-stakes game of eight-ball — and being home in time for dinner with the wife and kids.
This article appears in June 2 • 2000.