Joe [NOOK Book]

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Overview


Nearing fifty, Joe Ransom won't slow down, not in his pickup, not with a gun-and certainly not with women. But all the fast living in Mississippi won't fill the hunger Joe can't name. At fifteen, Gary Jones is already slipping through the cracks. Part of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, he's desperate for a way out. He finds it in Joe. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption-or ruinAn understated, powerful, beautiful evocation of a place, a time, a people.
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More About This Book

Overview


Nearing fifty, Joe Ransom won't slow down, not in his pickup, not with a gun-and certainly not with women. But all the fast living in Mississippi won't fill the hunger Joe can't name. At fifteen, Gary Jones is already slipping through the cracks. Part of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, he's desperate for a way out. He finds it in Joe. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption-or ruinAn understated, powerful, beautiful evocation of a place, a time, a people.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
With this powerful, immensely affecting novel Brown comes into his own as a writer of stature. As in his previous books ( Dirty Work ; Big Bad Love ), his subjects are poor Southern rednecks who exist from day to day, from hand to mouth, in tar-paper shacks and shabby mobile homes. Some are hard, mean and utterly lacking in moral fiber; others, such as the eponymous protagonist, try to live with integrity and dignity despite limited opportunities, despite the ingrained, ubiquitous habit of drinking prodigious amounts of beer and whiskey. Joe Ransom is almost 50, newly divorced, with bitter recollections of years spent in the pen for assaulting a police officer while drunk. A product of his time and place, Joe is reckless, self-destructive, hard-driving, hard-drinking, sometimes ruthless, but he is essentially kindhearted and decent. Joe manages a crew of black laborers who poison trees for a lumber company. When he gives a temporary job to teenage Gary Jones, part of a migratory family so destitute the boy has never seen a toothbrush or understood the significance of a traffic light, Joe is touched by the boy's dogged determination to work although Gary's alcoholic, vicious, amoral father takes the money as soon as Gary earns it. In his own laconic way Joe acts as mentor for Gary, until, in the novel's wrenching conclusion, fate and Joe's own stubborn morality wrench them apart. Seamlessly constructed, the novel hums with perfect pitch, with language as lean and unsparing as the poverty-mired Mississippi rural community Brown depicts. He has achieved mastery of descriptive detail, demonstrated in scenes that variously depict the contents of a country general store, a bloody dogfight, men butchering a deer, Joe cleaning out bullet wounds in his arm without an anesthetic, a punishing rainstorm. The dialogue is as natural as spring water. Brown never condescends to his uneducated, gambling-addicted, casually promiscuous characters; with compassion and eloquence, he illumines their painful lives and gives them worth. (Oct.)
Library Journal
The author of Dirty Work ( LJ 7/89) scores tough points with this disturbing look at the underside of rural life. Joe Ransom is 43, a hard-drinking, rough-edged ex-con who's used up most of the cards in his personal deck. Foreman of a Mississippi lumber company's ``tree-poisoning'' crew, he meets Gary Jones, age 15, seeking work. Gary's father is an itinerant farm worker, a man so thieving, murderous, and unwashed that Faulkner's Snopeses look genteel in comparison. Gary has never been to school, owned a toothbrush, or had enough to eat. He wants out of the everyday horror of his life. His dream is modest: to own an old pickup, to buy enough food to feed his addled mother and silent little sister. Joe likes Gary, and between backsliding bouts of boozing, whoring, and gambling, tries to help. The bond they forge and a slim hope for redemption link them in a shattering, inevitable climax. Recommended.-- Le nore Hart, Machipongo, Va.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
With this, his fourth book in as many years, Brown delivers on the huge promise of his first, the tough-as-nails collection of stories, Facing the Music. With none of the melodrama or self- indulgence of his last two books, Brown here pares his prose close to the bone, stripping away the slightest hint of sociology or regional color. This is white trash, lumpen fiction with a vengeance, and a vision of angelic desolation. Joe Ransom is an unlikely role model. He drinks too much, gambles too often, and angers too quickly. A failure as a father and husband, he did some time in the pen before returning home to his job as foreman for a forest defoliation crew. But to 15-year- old Gary Jones, Joe's a hero. The son of a truly evil no-count drunk migrant worker, Gary is honest, hard-working, and loyal. When his pathetic family wanders into this Mississippi town and squats in an abandoned country cabin, Gary finds a job on Joe's all-black crew. Saving to buy Hoe's old pickup, Gary hides his money from his foul-smelling father, a bum so low he sold one of his kids and pimps his 12-year-old daughter. Gary and Joe prove to be "kindred spirits"—they're both essentially good and just men, despite what the local cops think. Much of the novel demonstrates the disparity between Joe's worldliness and Gary's naivet‚—the illiterate teenager has never seen a toothbrush. In his direct, credible style, Brown also chronicles the utter depravity of Gary's old man, Wade. This is a world of pit bulls, shotguns, plump whores, and guys name "Icky"—an unlikely setting for Brown's profoundly moral fiction. "Bright with pain and liquor," this raw and gritty novel ranks with the best hard-knocks,down-and-out work of Jim Thompson and Harry Crews. It's lean, mean, and original.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781565127586
  • Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
  • Publication date: 9/30/2003
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 352
  • Sales rank: 60,269
  • File size: 2 MB

Meet the Author

Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life. At the age of thirty, a captain in the Oxford Fire Department, he decided to become a writer and worked toward that goal for seven years before publishing his first book, Facing the Music, a collection of stories, in 1988. With the publication of his first novel, Dirty Work, he quit the fire station in order to write fulltime. Between then and his untimely death in 2004, he published seven more books. His three grown children and his widow, Mary Annie Brown, live near Oxford.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 6 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 6 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 30, 2011

    Good Descriptive Characters

    Book was a very good story of a everyman and his coming to grips with both the mundane and evils that surround us all.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted July 18, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    634457215528 9780192836380 9780385527293 886974389323 9780743205382

    Finding Redemption in the Deep South

    Joe features one of the most believably evil characters in all of contemporary fiction, the father of a poor white trash family in Mississippi. They are homeless migrant workers and the father, an alcoholic, sells his infant son to a rich family. The main story is about the older son who befriends Joe, a middle age guy living out in the woods who needs to save a life for his own personal redemption. Larry Brown died too young. Here he is at the height of his powers. Please visit: timothyherrick.blogspot.com

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted April 28, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    Great Southern Book

    This is the best book I have ever had to read for a college course. I stayed up after a long day and read the whole thing. Brown has a great writing style and it keeps you on the edge of your seat. It is not predictable and you will want to know what is going to happen next. This book is going to be part of my permanent library and I will be reading it again and again. This book is a great escape from the outside world. I highly recommend this book.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted June 7, 2010

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 28, 2008

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 4, 2012

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