Father and Son
original dust jacket
AuthorLarry Brown (Author)
CountryUSA
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
PublisherAlgonquin Books
Publication date
1996
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages360
ISBN9781565120143

Father and Son (1996) is a novel by American writer Larry Brown. It received the 1997 Southern Book Award for Fiction.[1][2]

Brief synopsis

Glen Davis serves 3 years in Parchman Prison for killing a child in a drunk driving accident. 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.[3][4]

Principal characters

  • 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[4]

Background

Father and Son was Brown's third published novel. When it was published in 1996, it was Brown's sixth book to have appeared over the previous eight years.[5] 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).[4][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.”[6]

Setting and themes

Father and Son is set in 1968 in and around Oxford, Mississippi including nearby Tula and Paris.[3] 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…”[4]

Reception and legacy

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.”[7] Kirkus Reviews called it a “riveting tale of an unforgiving and cruel world.”[8]

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.”[9] Eugene McAvoy, in The Virginian-Pilot muted his praise of the novel, calling it a “competent, though imperfect, novel” but it is “testimony to a daring voice in American letters.”[5]

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.”[4][n 2] More than 25 years after the novel first appeared in 1996, popular crime-writer Ace Atkins was asked about Father and Son’s scenes of violence. 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.”[3]

Notes

  1. ↑ 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”
  2. ↑ 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

  1. ↑ Conversations with Larry Brown. University Press of Mississippi. (Publisher’s Page). Archived from the original on 2023-06-04.
  2. ↑ "Father and Son". Goodreads.
  3. 1 2 3 "The Backlist: Revisiting Larry Brown's 'Father and Son' with Ace Atkins". February 2, 2023.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Short, Carroll Dale, “Father and Son”; Magill’s Literary Annual 1997 (June 1997)
  5. 1 2 "Brown mines Good, Evil Between Father and Son". scholar.lib.vt.edu.
  6. ↑ Brown, Larry. Billy Ray’s Farm. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. p. 2. ISBN 978-1-56512-709-8.
  7. ↑ "Father and Son by Larry Brown". Publisher’s Weekly.
  8. ↑ "FATHER AND SON | Kirkus Reviews". Kirkus Reviews. July 20, 1996 – via www.kirkusreviews.com.
  9. ↑ Quinn, Anthony (22 September 1996). "The Summer of Hate". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2018-01-28.
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