Seventeen-year-old Fay escapes from her brutish family and sets off to hitch from Oxford, Mississippi, to Biloxi. Barely schooled, barely literate, Fay has never heard of the Civil War. She doesn't know that you're supposed to tip waitresses. She's never been to a movie. And most dangerously, she has no idea of the effect she has on men.
She catches a break - picked up by Sam, a state trooper with a lakeside home and a private sorrow he shares with his wife Amy. For the first time in her life Fay feels favoured by fortune. But tragedy and jealousy intervene, and she heads on to Biloxi, leaving a dead body behind her.
In Biloxi, Fay is dragged into a sordid world of strippers, whores and drugs, and a relationship with Aaron, a menacing bouncer. She learns how to survive there, though she wishes Sam could come and rescue her. But although Fay is ignorant, she's not stupid. And as the book moves to its violent conclusion, we realise she's not willing to be a victim all her life.
In Fay, with its unforgettable heroine and its utterly mesmeric evocation of the American South, Larry Brown has written another modern American classic.
That Brown reminds you of Faulkner and of McCarthy . . . is a compliment to each' USA Today
'Father and Son is one of the very best novels of our time . . . Not since Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has a novelist probed as deeply into the paternal condition, the plight of it, the splendour of it' Washington Times
Larry Brown looks at things square-on, drinks you under the table, kicks your ass and breaks your heart. Full of tenderness, without pity, he shows up a hard life for what it is: a little bit of good luck and a lot more bad luck, cold hard reality and largehearted hope, prayer for a miracle without a miracle in the end. What’s best though, even better than that, he gives you so much of the why and how of people, you can’t ever look at the what the same way again.
“Don’t say what you would or wouldn’t do, honey. Cause one day you might have to.”
I loved Sam most. And of course Fay, sweet Fay.
First read December 2011
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November 2012:
I thought it was Jewel and Mary and Virgil of Father and Son who would stick with me so vividly this year, but no. It’s Sam and Fay. Brown wrote this himself when Fay wouldn’t let him alone, when he couldn’t stop thinking what happened to her after Joe. It shows. It bleeds right through the page, that affection-without-pity. Powerful and contagious.
And the second time through it’s even more tremendous, how simply and fully Sam and Fay are brought to real life. I dare you to even try to judge people the same way after this one. It’s one of the several contributors, why I barely have any tolerance left for the people in books who only say and do and think the right things and think that makes them good.
We sabotaged a whole factory of magic eight balls so they only tell the truth, was the Softer World strip the other day. We are all fucked, and we are all saved.
And like a hundred other things in the course of a week I thought, Fay.
Reading updates
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16 November, 2012:
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16 November, 2012:
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