A Miracle of Catfish review

Day 2 of Larry Brown Week.

In the prologue to his essay collection, Billy Ray’s Farm, Larry Brown writes about the many times he was asked what it was about his hometown of Oxford, Miss., that seemed to spawn so many great writers. In answering, he offers as good a summation as any of the reason why his is such a singular voice, and why his stories, settings and characters rang so true:

“The things you know, the things you have seen or heard of, the things you can imagine. A writer rolls all that stuff together kind of like a taco and comes up with fiction. And I think whatever you write about, you have to know it. Concretely, absolutely, realistically.”

Perhaps that’s why his previous novel, The Rabbit Factory, rang somewhat false. A writer shouldn’t be limited to writing only about what they know in terms of their life, upbringing and geography – I think what Brown was getting at was more about knowing the spirit of the story and the hearts of the people who populate it – but if they veer outside of that, they need to take pains to make sure that what they write holds a similar truth that can be found in some other element of the story.

With The Rabbit Factory, Brown seemed to be trying to stretch, probably too much. I don’t begrudge him that; I encourage it, in fact, and the result at times was as good as anything he had previously written. But it seemed self-conscious, and Brown’s work could be called a lot of things, but until that book, that wasn’t one of them.

His new novel, the posthumously published A Miracle of Catfish, incomplete though it may be, rings true. I mean this as no backhanded compliment, but it feels like the kind of story Brown could tell sitting on the porch of his house, a cold beer cradled in his hand. Nearly all of its characters feel three-dimensional and alive, and their various motivations and interactions truly resonate. Brown seemed to be trying for Barry Hannah-like comedy in The Rabbit Factory, but it felt forced. Here, he seems to have found a workable middle ground between the dour, dark tone of his earlier works and the more light-hearted humor he sought in his previous book. Where those previous books could feel claustrophobic at times – perhaps because, as he told me of his characters in an interview around the time of The Rabbit Factory, “I try to get them in trouble as soon as I can and just go from there” – A Miracle of Catfish feels wide open.

Here, he tells the story of several residents in and around a Mississippi town, focusing mainly on three men with more than their share of troubles. There is Jimmy’s daddy (he gets no other name here), father of young Jimmy. He has a wandering eye, a lust for beer, more interest in his ’56 Chevy than in his marriage and few if any redeeming traits. There is Cortez Sharp, the real center of the story, an old farmer who has a fishing pond dug on his property, and who doesn’t pay much attention to his dying wife. Lastly there is Cleve, an elderly black man who one worked for Sharp and who is dealing with his daughter and her annoying boyfriend, who moved into his trailer.

Several other people populate the book, none more sympathetic or well-drawn as Jimmy, a gradeschooler with a go-cart who longs for more attention and affection from his disinterested and borderline criminally neglectful father. All of these people interact in ways that are both expected and surprising; if this were a book by, say, Kent Haruf, things would resolve in a fairly tidy way with the characters all scarred but smarter. This isn’t a Haruf book, however; one wonders if any of the events would truly lead these characters to change. Though catfish are a fulcrum of the story, there is nothing miraculous here, either in a singular event or cumulatively. Perhaps given the chance to complete this, Brown would have rectified this.

The book does have shortcomings. Despite editor Shannon Ravenel’s efforts to remove 30,000 words from the original 710-page manuscript, the story still drags in places. There are characters that pop in and out without really making much impact, plot tangents left unresolved and, most glaringly, it lacks an ending. You can forgive all of that, however; this is labeled “a novel in progress,” and it reads as such. Brown’s books were never flabby, and one can safely assume this would have been tightened and polished before publication had he not died before having the chance to do so. Given that assumption, the finished product wouldn’t better classics like Joe or Fay, but they would certainly render this a worthy addition to a back catalog stuffed with great books.

The jacket copy proclaims the book’s publication to be a bittersweet occasion; the reader has the chance to read Brown’s last work, but must also acknowledge that it is indeed the last. Flaws and all, it is well worth the time spent, and it is a testament to how large a hole Brown’s passing leaves in the world of literature, Southern or otherwise.