Billy Ray's Farm
By Larry Brown
Algonquin Books/$22.95
Larry Brown's writing is grittier than gravel, and there's a truckload of the stuff in the 10-essay collection Billy Ray's Farm. Some pieces are about writerly subjects (book tours, literary pals) but the prevailing theme is far more hard-knock: Namely, the small farm experience. Getting his training firsthand helping his son work a struggling farm, Brown takes us along through the travails, accidents, heavy reliance on family and friends, costly mistakes, botched animal breeding and, here or there, the small triumph.
In Shack, Brown writes about building a small house next to the pond he owns. It's butch work, and for reasons that remain murky, he has or seeks no assistance. Life frequently disrupts his work, including the time he has to paint eight outside doors at his regular house. He is a fastidious painter, he writes. I feel there can be no other kind. Some people want to just slop shit all over another door or something. But that's not my way. I like to be careful with the stuff that belongs to me.
Vintage Brown. Although he doesn't get into defending just why a guy whose house has eight doors even needs a cabin, he does paint a nice portrait of life in disharmony with a dream.
So Much Fish, So Close to Home: An Improv is the standout piece, a somnambulistic, day-in-the-life, literally, in which Brown stays up all night partying, then spends the next day searching for shade, food, drink, a renegade bull and, at a Gothic mass killing, catfish.
While not necessarily as gripping as his fiction, Brown's essays are like a curtain parted to reveal the human condition, as experienced outside suburbia. Thank God for places like Mississippi. And thank God I don't have to live there.
—David Jasper
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2001.