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 |
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]
Glen 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]
At 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]
Father 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]
At 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 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]