Larry Brown's Inner Fire

In Larry Brown's novels, characters rarely enter their cars without stocking them first with coolers of beer. So maybe it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise when, in real life, Brown grabs a couple of Budweisers before sliding behind the wheel for an automobile tour of the back roads near his home just north of Oxford, Miss. As he drives, Brown, 48, points out the homes of his mother, his cousin and his wife's cousin. "My kinfolk have lived here for generations," he says. "I've been to a lot of places, and I've never found any one I like as much as this one."

Near the plot of land where he is building a writing cabin, he passes the dirt road where Fay Jones, the 17-year-old main character of his haunting fourth novel, Fay (Algonquin; 484 pages; $24.95), first appears, fleeing her abusive father. She is penniless, poorly educated and the bearer of an ill fate that brings tragedy into the life of every man who crosses her path. Among those who meet their doom after meeting Fay are Sam, a state trooper who brings her into his home after picking her up on the highway, and Aaron, a violent bouncer at a strip club in Biloxi.

More concerned with plot than pathos, Brown presents his characters without judgment or sentiment, a courtesy he extended to all the luckless, hard-drinking, rootless denizens of his previous work. On the strength of his bleak, intimately detailed portraits of blue-collar Mississippians, and his insistence on setting his stories in and around his hometown (a region fictionalized by William Faulkner as Yoknapatawpha County), Brown is being celebrated as a new voice of the South, or, as he's also been dubbed, one of the "bad boys" of Southern literature.

In person Brown hardly seems the type to raise hell. Gracious, soft spoken and unassuming, he is above all steadfastly committed to his work. He didn't begin writing until he turned 29. At the time, he was working as a fireman, having joined the department after a stint in the Marines. "I had a good job," he says. "I just didn't want to do it for 30 years. I got to where the only thing I wanted was to write."

Brown struggled through eight years--and 250 rejection slips--before getting published. Working odd jobs to support his family, he spent his nights writing, throwing out whole novels he deemed unworthy. "I had periods of black depression," he says, "but I knew it would take years to learn what I had to do." His efforts have earned him enough recognition to warrant his own documentary (The Rough South of Larry Brown, now in production) and, more important, have given him the luxury to devote himself full time to writing. "It all boils down to individual desire, discipline and how much time you spend sitting alone in your room," he says. "It's the ones who try the hardest that succeed." The tough times are finally ending for Brown; now he leaves the suffering to his characters.