Instead of blogging this past Tuesday I went to a lunch gathering of some writers and other book folks in Nashville.  During the course of conversation, the movie Precious came up, and the book it’s based on, Push, by Sapphire. One writer said she’d read a review that panned the movie because the movie perpetuated stereotypes of low-income African Americans.

 My intellectual an oh so articulate response to the review was, “That’s bullshit.” Now, this response isn’t quite fair, since I haven’t seen the movie. However, I did read Push years ago. The book is amazing. And like all good literary fiction, it doesn’t look away from what isn’t pleasant. Literature is a record of the lived experience of the human race in the “best of times” and the “worst of times,” as Mr. Dickens wrote. In the documentary The Rough South of Harry Crews, another Gary Hawkins classic, Crews says, “What is Shakespeare but regicide and genocide…?”

 If your system is too delicate to face the world’s darker ills, don’t look. But because a work takes on some hard subject matter that, by necessity, incorporates facets of a well worn stereotype, that doesn’t mean it’s a waist of time or perpetuating anything.  If we can’t look where it’s hard to look, how can we change anything? Every life is important, and literature proves that point by turning us toward what looks on the surface to be familiar, but is in fact particular, complex, and not familiar at all, unless it is in that universal sense were we as readers recognize we all have dysfunction, disappointment, determination, disillusion, and of course the potential for redemption.

There are plenty of books out there if you want a safe read, an escape, to protect your sensitive nature, to avoid reading cuss words, etc. If you’re looking for some wussy read, don’t go to Larry Brown. He looked, looked hard, and put what he saw on the page without appology. He wrote what he knew, maybe not always what he himself had done, but certainly what he’d witnessed, what he knew the human heart was capable of–best and worst.

Jim Dees in “Bard of the Bottoms,” collected in Jay Watson’s anthology of interviews Conversations with Larry Brown, points out, “More than one reviewer has pointed out that in the hands of a less talented writer [Brown's] characters and plots would come off as bad Southern stereotypes or parody. Brown’s skill, crafty nuance, and unerring ear for dialogue keep his tales from drifting into ‘hillbilly overkill.’ But everything is real.” (Watson 120) Dees goes on to say, “The New York Times said Father and Son is a ‘blue collar tragedy that is the work of a writer absolutely confident in his voice.’ This confidence is born out of Brown’s years of watching his world and having the integrity to call ‘em like he bleeds ‘em. He hasn’t hop-scotched the globe searching for stories like many authors, preferring instead to work hard tending his family and fiction in Yocona.” (Watson 121)

As Brown says in The Rough South of Larry Brown, “You  many not like what I write, but by God, you have to say its honest.”

 Works cited:

 Brown, Larry. Father and Son. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books. 1997.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. London: Doubleday & McClure Co. 1900.

Daniels, Lee. Dir. Precious. Lee Daniels Entertainment, 2009.

Hawkins, Gary. Dir. The Rough South of Harry Crews. North Carolina Public Television, 1991. Video.

Hawkins, Gary. Dir. The Rough South of Larry Brown. Downhome Entertainment and Blue Moon Film Productions, 2008. DVD.

Sapphire. Push. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Watson, Jay, ed. Conversations with Larry Brown. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007.

Recommendation: Take an unflinching look at Brown’s novel Father and Son and Sapphire’s Push. Then let’s go to the movies and see Precious, form our own opinions. When you get back from the theater, start A Tale of Two Cities. A dip into the classics is always refreshing and instructive. And where better to sauna yourself in storytelling than in a Dickens novel?

Scene storm word list plucked from Father and Son:

blanket

return

traffic

whitewash

register

patties

eyeglasses

apron

cellophane

tongue