2.19.2007
PASTE
A MIRACLE OF CATFISH - Paste Magazine Review, 03/07
"Trailers, hog hunts, trotlines, and age-old aches"
In A MIRACLE OF CATFISH, late novelist Larry Brown digs out a pond in backwoods Mississippi, stocks it with a monster-sized momma-fish named Ursula (plus 3,000 whiskered kin), and spins a tale of nearby happenings, mostly in the mingled lives of four men and a boy.
Brown knows well the shabby, rusted-out places we all drive by Out There. MIRACLE's five narrators, for instance, walk the gravel stretches of life: They're stove factory workers, fish farmers, kids with rotting teeth, mothers unwed and men with secrets in the barn. The book's powerful author conjures them to life - old and young, black and white, aquatic and psychotic.
Beginning in the late '80s, Brown brought common folk like this to the surface, showing them as true avatars of fault, wit and wish-for goodness. He would know. A one-time Mississippi fireman, Brown worked himself into a Southern Lit benchmark before dying, at age 53, in 2004.
So is it the miracle of fiction? Reading CATFISH, you sense Brown - whose real-life grave rests by a pond on Mississippi family land - is eerily close, like a great fish circling the mudbottoms. TB
A MIRACLE OF CATFISH - Paste Magazine Review, 03/07
"Trailers, hog hunts, trotlines, and age-old aches"
In A MIRACLE OF CATFISH, late novelist Larry Brown digs out a pond in backwoods Mississippi, stocks it with a monster-sized momma-fish named Ursula (plus 3,000 whiskered kin), and spins a tale of nearby happenings, mostly in the mingled lives of four men and a boy.
Brown knows well the shabby, rusted-out places we all drive by Out There. MIRACLE's five narrators, for instance, walk the gravel stretches of life: They're stove factory workers, fish farmers, kids with rotting teeth, mothers unwed and men with secrets in the barn. The book's powerful author conjures them to life - old and young, black and white, aquatic and psychotic.
Beginning in the late '80s, Brown brought common folk like this to the surface, showing them as true avatars of fault, wit and wish-for goodness. He would know. A one-time Mississippi fireman, Brown worked himself into a Southern Lit benchmark before dying, at age 53, in 2004.
So is it the miracle of fiction? Reading CATFISH, you sense Brown - whose real-life grave rests by a pond on Mississippi family land - is eerily close, like a great fish circling the mudbottoms. TB
posted by TB at 11:52
