Joe

I’m a sucker for a Southern gothic page-turner, particularly one that features such a complicated character like Joe Ransom who, when you first meet him, you don’t know if you should approach or just run away. Then bring teenage Gary into the mix with his troubled family backstory and this sheds a new light on Joe, and Gary as well, as the two traverse the muddy path to redemption.

Brown’s descriptive prose paints a harsh picture of the world, warts and all, yet it also has an underlying tragic beauty. 

Fiction as literature of the resistance? Larry Brown’s Joe is a top candidate for what I’d call The Great American Novel. There are many entries, of course: as many stories as there are communities, past, present, and even future. 

What I love about Joe is the simplicity of metaphor. A backwoods ne’er-do-well, Joe Ransom makes his living killing—literally—the great wild biodiversity hardwood powerhouse forests of the Mississippi bottomlands by injecting them with poison so that they die, and the rich forest can be converted to the homogenous, fast-growing, essentially sterile monoculture of southern yellow pine. His way of life—wild, reckless,… show more.