Rating: 
Summary: Evil is described and challenged well...
Review: Another A+ for Larry Brown with Father & Son. Well described as the ultimate in small-town evil, Glen hasn't learned anything from being locked up. He terorizes everyone he faces in this novel leaving behind, amongst others, a disregarded son, a struggling brother, and an abandoned father. The list of crimes he commits rises in this story, from rape to robbery to murder and beyond. Jewell, the woman he left behind has raised their son for the three years he's been gone only to find that after his release there's no hope of love for them. She turns to the county sherriff, Bobby, Glen's arch rival. There's so many secrets in this novel, buried more than six feet deep, that it's almost impossible to put down. As always, you'll be glued to the final pages in Brown's novel! After you've read one of Larry Brown's books you can't help but be a life fan. He is truly a brilliant writer. I suggest all of his novels and short-stories. In paticular, this one, Fay, and Joe. Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Love and Hate
Review: Brown's ability to create real people, and not shallow characters, is fully on display in "Father and Son" (though my particular Brown favorite is "Fay"). The conflict between good and evil, is to some extent kept lower case here (not Good and Evil). Though the crimes of Glen Davis are shocking and extreme, by the novel's end he is a shrunken and pathetic figure, a damaged (but very dangerous) boy who could never accept one simple truth (which his father, the very flawed Virgil Davis, has come to recognize): we are all sinners. On the other hand, the novel's other major characters, use Love as a means to move on, to transcend, the hard things of life. Glen's kind of hate must eventually, in the end, devour itself. With that in mind, it is fitting that Glen's young son represents such a moving on beyond the sins of the father(s). Brown's ability to shape such messages and place it them the mouths (and souls) of his characters, while avoiding preaching, is what makes Father and Son a piece of fine literature.
Rating:
Summary: The character of a thug and his town
Review: Brown's third novel, set in 1968, concerns the events of five days following the release of Glen Davis from prison. Having served three years for the drunk-driving death of a small boy, Davis returns to his Mississippi home town with scores to settle.
Brown's Deep South, working class voice drips with heat and smolders with trouble. Davis is a sullen, vicious young thug convinced that all his troubles are anyone's fault but his and determined to exact revenge. Not exactly an original character but Brown's gritty, laconic style imbues him with a foreboding sense of menace that seems to surround the whole town while people go about their business, knowing the danger but unwilling to quite believe it.
Within 50 pages, Glen has killed - casually, with intent but almost without thought. The next morning he begins to harangue Virgil, his father, about the lack of a headstone on his mother's grave.
"Virgil didn't look up. He couldn't reason with him. Not when he got things in his head and kept them that way. It wasn't any use to try. He was worn down and he'd had a long rest but now this rest was over and he didn't know if he could take this all over again."
As Glen creeps and careens around his town, drinking and wreaking brutal havoc as the whim grabs him, secrets begin to crawl up out of the worn linoleum floors and the fly-blown windows - cracks in the veneer of sainthood Glen has constructed around his dead mother, an unspeakable childhood incident that fuels Glen's hatred and weighs heavily on his father, a tangled history with the sheriff and his mother.
Sheriff Bobby Blanchard's stand-up confrontation with Glen goes deeper than Bobby's love for Jewel, Glen's girlfriend and the mother of his child. Bobby himself grew up without a father. "He still didn't know anything about working on a car. Still didn't know how to slip up on a squirrel." He's always wanted his mother to marry again. "To somebody. Anybody. So I could have had somebody to show me the stuff I needed to know. So you could have had somebody too."
The thought of Glen with Jewel "was too awful and the image was something he'd managed to keep out of his head so far." Bobby is restrained, thoughtful, caring - a little envious of Glen and a little pitying too. Glen is simpler. He hates Bobby, always has.
But why is Jewel wavering? What does she or did she ever see in Glen? Jewel is a normal, responsible parent, not given to heavy drinking or hankerings for excitement or abuse. While the motives of Brown's male characters are real and freighted with a lifetime of history, Jewel remains a cipher.
But it's a small quibble. Brown's simple, poetic, gritty style brings this small town to life while it drives toward an inevitable climax of violence and renewal.
Another fine novel from the award-winning author of "Dirty Work" and "Joe."
Rating:
Summary: Conflict, Death and Violence -- Larry Brown never escapes
Review: Despair and guilt lay the groundwork for Larry Brown's newest novel, *Father and Son* as the South's latest voice creates the cruelest character to date, Glen Davis. This man brings you to a standstill. Within two days of release from state prison Glen has raped, killed, rejected his son and father and smashed every bone in a monkey's body. The heart punding fury of this book covers only five days, "five days you will never forget." Brown sets no restrictions on his writing or his characters. He is willing to imagine the worst and then makes you live it. Only psychological complexity squeezes out the painful glimpses of hope so desperatly desired while reading. As Larry Brown stated in an interview, "For some of them there's not going to be an easier way out - some of them are going to have to pay the price, the human price...[because]they just have to become like real folks." Nothing in *Father and Son* is disguised or sugar coated. It takes guts to read a novel such as this and own up to a reality you hope to never live.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful and Gripping
Review: Finally I have gotten around to reading Larry Brown. Goodness, goodness: What I've been missing! Father and Son will cause you to gasp and wince as you follow the wretched decisions Glen Davis makes (the main character). The trail of pain he leaves behind will shake you to the core. You love the character but hate the man. You want to scream at him as he scowls through one mistep after another. He is beyond the reach of reason, and his behavior gives new meaning to the words "dysfunction" and "aberration."
He is evil and his journey is tragic. How Brown portrays it and makes us care is awe-inspiring: tone offers the incidents in understated, almost casual objectivity; characters emerge bold and beautiful in their sorrow; plot screams forward like a runaway train on a hardened track; descriptions are as sharp as a razor-slice, quick and vivid and incisive.
I agree with the book-jacket quotation that says, "The model is Faulkner, but his influence has been absorbed and transcended." I raise a glass and toast Larry Brown, and soon I will read his other two books that are hailed so highly here: Joe and Fay (after bracing myself first by throwing down a shot or two).
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Novel
Review: For years, people had recommended Larry Brown to me, but I demured. Oxford, MS had produced one great writer, Faulkner, and that seemed like the end. Could a small town produce 2 great writers? Probably not. John Grisham certainly didn't make me amend this idea.However, after reading "Father and Son," I have to acknowledge that Oxord has two master writers. The novel is about a group of people in the American South during the late 1960s. The action takes place over the course of a week or so. The protagonist, a seemingly amoral anti-hero, has just been released from prison for killing a child when driving drunk. Far from being rehabilitated, he's set on righting what he perceives as personal wrongs. His perception is warped, however, by childhood trauma, as we witness in his crime spree of murder, rape and violence. Brown has crafted an exceptional piece of work. The plot is thoroughly compelling, if sometimes gory, there is a very rich and nuanced sense of place, the characters are all three-dimensional--even the ones we meet but momentarily, and this is quite a feet. I give Brown the highest kudos, though, for the authorial tone. He treats this collection of cads, ne'er-do-wells, scoundrels and vicious rednecks (and a few kindly souls) in an objective, restrained, real, fair and unbiased manner. This is a difficult feat. Brown is a wonderful storyteller and "Fathers and Sons" is an outstanding novel.
Rating:
Summary: Long, hot summer
Review: I'm giving this novel 4.5 stars and rounding up to 5. It's a good read, a page-turner; shocking at points, funny at others. As a story set in small town Mississippi during the 1960s, it invites comparison with Faulkner, and has plenty of Faulkner's melodrama, but without the convoluted prose style and endless sentences. In the opening pages there are two murders and the killing and mutilation of a monkey. This is followed by scenes of heavy drinking, desultory sex, rape, street fighting, shootings, more drinking, breaking and entering, theft, more sex, assault, all set against a history of more of the same. That's the steamy Faulknerian pot-boiler part that keeps you turning pages. What Brown brings to the mix is a fascination with the absolutely ordinary routine of daily life that his characters live in the midst of all the melodrama. During the handful of days during which the action of the story takes place, we get to spend a lot of time with several of his characters: an old widower living alone with his dog, an unmarried mother who works as a fry-cook in a diner, the sheriff who still lives with his mother, an ex-con just out of prison, his hapless brother with a trailer house full of kids, who loses his job, and a retired school teacher who's grown son was fathered by a local married man. As the long, hot summer days and nights pass, one after the other, Brown follows his characters, each often alone with their thoughts, at home, at work, or just driving their cars. The pace between sudden bursts of plot is slow, unhurried. Brown notes the passage of the sweltering sun across the sky and the eventual storms that bring rain. And you become absorbed not only in the gradual flow of daily activity and the small talk that disguises deeper yearnings and sorrows, but in the Faulkner-like ghosts of a violent and passionate past that continue to haunt the present. The book is true to its title, being full of layer upon layer of references to fathers and sons, and in particular the emotional damage done when sons die young and suddenly. A quick count in the novel yields five dead sons, whose fathers live on after them in various states of grief. In some ways, the narrative flow is almost biblical. The old man with his good-son, bad-son offspring bring to mind Adam, Cain, and Abel. Or David and Absalom. I recommend this novel to anyone interested in the writers of the Deep South. Brown has certainly earned his place in that tradition.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting, Exhausting
Review: In Father and Son: A Novel, the star is the villain, the antihero. Instead of hating him for all his dastardly, savage deeds, it's easy to care for him. He is, in a sense, a wayward vehicle, a device gone bad by way of circumstance, killing or crippling anything in its way. Larry Brown weaves a tale of tragedy that leaves the reader exhausted, reflective. After all, how many of us, if we suffered and survived the same boyhood as this criminal, would have emerged with any greater sanity
Rating:
Summary: Real Bad Guys, Real Good Guys
Review: Larry Brown is the best fiction writer in America. In hisnewest novel, "Father and Son" the author brings out withan amazing accuracy for patient detail characters who show us the true split between evil and good. If you love the south, brave men who would never make it in Hollywood, and pondering in your mind what will come next, don't miss this book. You will never find an ex-firefighter who can write like this again (nor possibly anyone else).
Rating:
Summary: beautiful characters, spare and poetic
Review: Larry Brown was one of our greatest writers and I hate the fact that he is now gone. Of his novels, I think Father and Son is his best work, followed by Fay. The characters in Father and Son are so richly drawn that they seemed more real to me than some of the real people I know, and Brown has such a unique and direct way of describing his characters and the town they live in and things like how the sun is hitting a field that it comes across as poetry written by someone who is not trying to show off and who has a handle on how he sees things and can beautifully transcribe those perceptions. Even the "villian" of this novel is so beautifully drawn that I found myself cheering for him, supecting that things weren't going to work out for the best and wishing I could change it. Unlike with most books I've read, I would have been happy if Brown had tacked on another 300 pages. A brilliant work by a brilliant writer, and one of those rare books that can widen and make richer the reader's life. Buy it or borrow it and read it today.
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