Editorial Reviews:
She's had no education, and you can't call what her father's been trying to give her "love." So at seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home, carrying a purse with half a pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. She's headed for the bright lights and big times of Biloxi, and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay.There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster with money for a night or two on the town. There's a strip-joint bouncer who deals on the side. And in the end, there are five dead bodies stacked in Fay's wake. Fay is a novel that could only have been written by Larry Brown, whom the Boston Globe called "one of our finest writers -- honest, courageous, unflinching."
Larry Brown's Fay picks up at the precise moment when its 17-year-old heroine walks out of his 1991 novel Joe. And really, who could blame her? Fay's father, Wade Jones, was one of the most enduring villains in recent fiction, the kind of man who would trade a son for a car and a daughter's virginity for a few $20 bills. Reared in migrant camps, tarpaper shacks, and, most recently, an abandoned cabin, Fay herself is pretty, goodhearted, astonishingly ignorant: in other words, trouble in a too-tight dress and a pair of rotting tennis shoes. Fleeing her father's advances, she takes to the Mississippi road in a passage that, with its rough music, is pure Brown: She came down out of the hills that were growing black with night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken stones that made her wince. Alone for the first time in the world and full dark coming quickly. House lights winked through the trees as she walked and swung her purse from her hand. She could hear cars passing down the asphalt but she was still a long way from that. For the first time, Brown narrates most of a novel from a woman's point of view, and while the result is every bit as gripping as his previous work, it is also more inward-looking. Joe, for instance, reads like something carved out of a block of granite; in Fay, Brown feels somehow closer to the story--almost tender, or as tender as a writer with such an unflinching gaze can be. As Fay hitchhikes her way down Highway 55, from the woods near Oxford to the beaches and strip bars of Biloxi, she draws both men and violence to her like a magnet. Utterly without envy or self-pity, she is a force of nature, pure and simple, and Fay illuminates just how deadly her kind of innocence can be. It's no value judgment to say this book is about white trash. Brown knows it, the reader knows it, Fay knows it; at one point, she even muses, "She never had been called a white trash piece of shit before but she'd been called white trash." But don't mistake Brown's work for mere trailer-park sociology. Despite the redneck trappings, the Jones family has been with us since the beginning of time, and their story, like all tragedies, is both larger than life and just like it too. "White trash," after all, is just another way of saying "not many choices." In writing about lives stripped down to their essentials, Brown reminds us of the dark truths our choices sometimes allow us to forget. --Mary Park
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 63 total reviews (Page 1 of 13):
 You know its bad when you laugh at tragedy.
I'm generally a fan of a hard luck story - whether it's fiction or memoir. And given some tough times in my life, I've often found such stories credible - even when other reviewers and critics did not - such as The Glass Castle. Also, I understand a life characterized by poverty brings much tragedy. However, this book was so absurdly bad with the never ending incredible tragedies, at some point I started laughing at them. Then, I quit the book even before I was half way through.
The main character can't seem to get through a single day without being raped (statutory or otherwise), seeing someone hit by a truck, losing a loved one to a car accident, losing a sibling to a car trade, getting knocked up, having someone try to kill her or killing someone herself in self defense. At some point, it was hilarious. I was just waiting for the day where she struck unconscious by wayward frozen airline sewage while walking on the beach, only to be gang raped by twelve year olds while still unconscious and then attacked by a shark after the tide came in and the ocean water nearly drowned her.
I never read Joe - maybe all that happened to her in that book already.
 100% Great Story !!!
This is the second book I read from this author and I ADORED his character Fay, she was so wide-eyed innocent but then at the same time, this little firecracker when someone tried to mess her over. She had so much to learn about the world and it was interesting to see her learn from the Sheriff the most, but then also from poor Amy,that brute Aaron, trampy-sorry Reena.One of the things that is so good is the author told the story from all the character's viewpoints, he allowed the reader to understand nearly all of their motives,and what drove each to be the way they were and/or do the things they'd done. Very good southern story and I am an official Larry Brown Fan. Read This Book!
This was an amazing find and I can't believe I hadn't heard of this book sooner. It was so engaging, I couldn't put it down. You quickly got drawn into a world we know so very little about and into Fay's story. I could see this done well as an independent film. Classic. Southern. Great Dialogue. Inspired.
Brown writes dialogue between characters in a way inspired by writers or poets like Robert Burns. It does not make fun of the people that inspire the dialogue, but makes them stand out from the page as real. Flawed persons throughout the novel mixed in with a little heartbreak. Recall the journey in Light in August by William Faulkner. Recall also the dialogue in Faulkner's characters. Brown writes in an area of Mississippi not far from Faulkner and could be seen often walking around the square in Oxford.
Fay is a sympathetic character, and one for which a couple of guys fall for. In some instances she seems callous, and then you might think you understand her. You don't hate her. You can see where she's coming from. And the men that didn't want to take advantage of her wanted to take care of her. It's a sad story, but very reflectic of the short term goals many people have, that is just getting by day by day. It's not glamourous, but is a wonderful story for what it conveys. He's a great Mississippi author. Read also from Big Bad Love, "Kabuki Rides" (a short story in the collection).  Fay, the Mermaid of Mississippi
Larry Brown uses clear simple sentences in the vein of Ernest Hemingway ("The Old Man and the Sea") to expound the journey of Fay Jones, a 17-year-old beauty, fleeing the increasingly sexual come-ons of her father, Wade Jones. "Fay" is set in the harsh world of Mississippi where the characters tend to have little education, money or choices. Fay is so desperate to leave her shack and would-be incestuous father, that despite only having two dollars, a half-pack of cigarettes and a pair of ratty tennis sneakers, she begins walking away with only the dim notion of going to Biloxi because it is on the coast and life must be better there.
Fay's one advantage is her beauty, but Brown does not go into detail about her appearance, except to say that her bosom is quite ample. It seems because of her outstanding looks that she is helped several times throughout the novel. At times it seems she is so innocent and would never use her "assets" to her advantage, but then there are several instances where she blatantly takes advantage. Most clear example being is Fay decides after a shower to slip off her towel in front of the recently widowed Sam Harris, the state trooper who picks up Fay on Highway 55. She never ate popcorn, went to a movie or made a telephone call, but she is far from innocent. Already at her young age she has a hankering for beer and cigarettes, and continues her habits even though she becomes pregnant due to Sam's inability to resist Fay's siren call.
Sam and the other man who is her main squeeze in the novel, Aaron, a strip-club bouncer who moonlights as a drug dealer, is also enticed by Fay's song. Perhaps their only chance was to tie themselves to a mast like Ulysses did in Homer's "The Iliad." Nonetheless, Fay, a girl with a woman's body, who left school early and lived in conditions that would be considered more akin to a third-world country can not be wholly to be blamed. For the milieu Fay has been born into and is struggling to survive in would be considered a society of dregs, or better known as white trash since the novel takes place in the American south. One roots for Fay, but there is also a sneaking suspicion in the back of one's mind: nothing good can come out of the gumbo of a mess that these people's lives are. Despite knowing the character's propensities, the ending still felt too neatly tied up and a cheat in some ways. However, an overall astounding look at characters living to just survive, often on a daily basis, by using simple, but beautifully written prose.
Bohdan Kot
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