Every reader should picture his or her own mythical beauty I see Laura Dern, circa 1987, wearing Egyptian-goddess eyeliner and bathed in a golden light. She is tan and long legged and a natural at sex - good men and bad want to keep her for their own. Perhaps because the bodies pile up around her, the book jacket calls Fay a femme fatale.

We learn in terse flashback that one of Fay's brothers was killed and another was traded for a car. Larry Brown, who was a fireman in Oxford before he turned to writing, heaps Gothic woe onto his most sympathetic characters, Fay and Sam: first-sex pregnancy, car crashes, gunfights, rapes and fires. In the novel's second half, she drifts down Highway 55 and into a thuggy milieu by the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus ends Fay's brief respite from tribulation. After a few months of happiness, two people are dead, and Fay, pregnant with Sam's baby, is on the lam. Their own daughter had died five years earlier, and Fay distracts them from their stalled, alcoholic marriage. Her second day on the highway, she's picked up by a middle-aged state trooper named Sam, who takes her home to his lonely wife. She doesn't know that there was a Civil War, that minors can't buy beer or what 'strip club' and 'appraised' mean. She has $3 and cigarettes in her bra.įay, who's sharper than Candide but knows even less, has never seen a seat belt, a pay phone, a movie, an oyster or that 'crazy rabbit hopping around with a black duck with a ring around his neck' on television. She's headed for Biloxi, more than 250 miles south, on foot. She's fleeing a family horror in some backwater near Oxford, Miss. The title character of Larry Brown's sixth novel, 'Fay,' comes 'down out of the hills that were growing black with night' and into focus like a moonlit apparition.

Fay by Larry Brown