A Miracle of Catfish
 
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When Larry Brown died suddenly in 2004 at 53, he left a nearly finished sixth novel, A Miracle of Catfish, that revisits several of his favorite themes: fatherhood, alienation, and loneliness. Shannon Ravenel, Brown's Algonquin editor, had the daunting task of trimming the enormous manuscript to manageable size, almost impossible for a responsible editor to do without the help of the author. Brown's prolix, rambling style is at times mesmerizing and at times--just rambling. Brown's notes at the end show us where the story might have gone, but it does not suffer for being unfinished. Larry Brown definitely knew where he was taking his reader, and Ravenel helped him along.   

Consideration of the fatherhood theme centers around a man known only as "Jimmy's Daddy," an unregenerate, wretched human being and an ignorant, violent drunkard. His preoccupations, view of women, and treatment of Jimmy might be seen as caricatures if we didn't know that such people actually exist. Another father, with a much more interesting story, is Cortez Sharp, a farmer in the low hills near Oxford, Mississippi, for nearly fifty years. He has a daughter, Lucinda, living "with a retard" in Atlanta. The man is a layabout artist who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, which makes Cortez think that he is simply retarded. Cortez has a deep, dark, guilty secret which is eventually revealed, but the two things that we know about him from the beginning are that he is terribly lonely and is stocking a pond he just had dug with catfish--thousands of catfish. Two minor players are Cleve, a muderous black man who is an occasional employee of Cortez's and Tommy, who delivers fish to stock Cortez's pond and owns Ursula, the Mother of all Catfish. Jimmy is the hapless nine-year-old who suffers at the hands of his daddy, and comes to the attention of Cortez who tells him--initially--to get off his property. All of these lives intersect in unexpected ways and are changed by the encounters. Brown writes hell-bent-for-leather in a style uniquely his own which carries the reader along, into landscapes interior and exterior. --Valerie Ryan  

From Publishers Weekly
This sprawling novel was unfinished when Mississippi writer Brown (Dirty Work, etc.) died at 53 in 2004. (It remains so, according to a note from editor Shannon Ravenel, who includes Brown's own notes for how the novel would end.) Cortez Sharp, a widower in his later years, decides to build a catfish pond on his Mississippi acreage, mostly because the pond will serve (he imagines drily and obliquely) to bring others around and assuage his dark loneliness. Nearby live young Jimmy and his ne'er-do-well father ("Jimmy's daddy"). There's also Lucinda, who is Cortez's daughter and the mother of Albert, a young man with Tourette's syndrome who speaks in rhyming obscenities. Lucinda pops tranquilizers and has a talent for getting into odd squabbles (over the quality of pigs' feet in a supermarket, for one). Elsewhere, Cleve, an African-American ex-con, kills a soldier who is the object of his daughter's affections and hides the body in the woods. Despite the cuts that Ravenel says were made (marked in the text with ellipses), there's a lot of superfluously detailed family history, interior monologue and Dixie atmospherics. Would-be boffo sequences (Cortez driving a tractor into the pond; Jimmy becoming inconsolable when his father sells his beloved Go Kart), are not sharp enough to carry one through. (May)
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Submitted On:

03 Oct 2007

File Author:

Brown, Larry

File Size:

2.90 MB