From Publishers Weekly
Grimly realistic, tragic-absurd and raunchy, Brown's latest novel returns to his deep South fictional territory and to the characters-poor, largely uneducated, hard-drinking, cigarette and dope smoking-that he portrays so well. This time he juggles a large cast with one thing in common: they're long-time losers whose paths intersect in or near Memphis. Arthur is nearly 70, impotent and fearful of losing his sexy younger wife, Helen. She tries to seduce teenaged Eric, a pet shop employee who fled his abusive father's rabbit factory-a metaphor for the uncaring world in which these people exist. Anjalee is a prostitute who smites the heart of Wayne, a navy boxer. Domino has survived a prison term and now works butchering meat for a gangster named Mr. Hamburger, who sells it to a man who owns lions. Trouble is, the body of one of Mr. Hamburger's victims turns up in the meat locker, which complicates Domino's extracurricular job dealing weed over the border in Mississippi. The plot includes several murders, lots of sex, domestic spats and plenty of action in bars. Even the violent scenes veer close to farce. Dogs figure prominently, one of them a pit bull named Jada Pickett. Miss Muffet, who is the housekeeper for one of the spoiled canines, has a plastic leg. Yet even with the advantage of Brown's keen eye for the absurdities of life and for the habits of people who live on the edge, the book fails to deliver the punch of his earlier works. Fay, his most accomplished novel to date, was darker, but one could identify with the protagonist. Here, the characters are all self-absorbed and incessantly whiny, and their obsessive rambling thoughts are recounted in numbing detail. Readers will understand well before the end that these sad lives will never go anywhere but down.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Brown is a much-beloved writer who was put on the literary map primarily by his very popular novel
Joe (1991). His latest will not only please his fans but also win him new ones. There is a kind of southern literary tradition for novelists to go "big screen" by following the plights and exploits of a slew of wacky but indelibly colorful individuals all living in one community and by alternating back and forth among their stories as they come to terms with life in their own peculiar fashion. That is exactly the mode Brown chooses here as we observe hooker Anjalee; older man Arthur along with his younger, sexually dissatisfied wife, Helen; "gunslinger" Frankie and his just desserts; ex-prisoner Domino and his sordid attempts to make a go of it outside the big house; and other equally "attractive" men and women working out their own destinies even when love, sex, and money (or the lack of any or all of the three) get in their way. This is not a gentle community these people inhabit; violence is just around the corner, as are the cops. One hysterical scene is followed by another, all of them underlain with the philosophy that you gotta do what you gotta do to be
able to do what you
wanna do. Can't go wrong with a conviction like that, can you? Read and see. But you
definitely can't go wrong with a novel that has dogs as fully developed characters in their own right.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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