Algonquin, 455 pages, $24.95
A Miracle of Catfish, the novel Larry Brown was writing when he died in 2004, is not finished. It ends with a page of Brown s notes on final chapters.
It matters, of course, that a good man died young, at 53, of a massive heart attack, that a gifted writer is gone.
It doesn t matter that you will close the book without knowing if Jimmy catches Ursula, the 40-pound catfish lurking at the bottom of Cortez Sharp s newly dug pond, secretly slipped into its muddy depth by the bankrupt Tommy of Tommy s Big Red Fish Truck.
It doesn t matter that you won t be offered Jimmy s daddy s next 10 egregious failures as a father.
After all, it s obvious a few pages into the book that Jimmy s daddy (his only name throughout the novel) will never actually manage to be a decent daddy.
And you will know without an ending that Cortez Sharp may never make adequate reparations for the wrongs he has done: a Ku Klux Klan past, a murder, 30 years of indifference to his wife. But you also will be sure that Jimmy, Cortez s daughter Lucinda, the catfish pond, spring and time itself are working their wonders, and Cortez is slowly becoming a kind man.
Brown, captain of the Oxford (Miss.) Fire Department until he quit to write full time, completed two short-story collections, two works of nonfiction and five novels before his death.
He mailed the nearly complete A Miracle of Catfish to his literary agent a week before he died.
While his writing was not changed, the 710-page manuscript was cut by Brown s longtime editor, Shannon Ravenel. Cuts are indicated by ellipses throughout the text.
Ravenel explains this in her editor s note, ending with the observation, For me, and I hope for you, it doesn t really matter that A Miracle of Catfish wasn t quite completed.
What he meant to say is as clear as can be.
And so it is.
Brown was dubbed the master of grit lit and often linked to William Faulkner in a literary, not just a geographic sense.
In A Miracle of Catfish, he absolutely knows exactly what he is doing, which is introducing you to the minutiae of hard rural days with too much alcohol and not enough love or money and to the minute-by-minute growth or destruction of character in those circumstances.
Jimmy is one of the finest people you ll ever meet in literature, a little boy with a go-kart, thwarted curiosity, thwarted hope and a big heart:
Then he hit the gas and the shiny red go-kart spun in a tight circle in the loose dirt, the chain clattering, the herd of tiny dogs cavorting and somersaulting in the dust, they and the little girl chasing the go-kart bouncing back through the brown leaves on the old log road and the green leaves in the shady woods toward the grassless mobile home that was no longer mobile, merely home.
Brown is such a great pleasure to read.
Each word is just right. The details are exact. The rhythm enchants.
And each life is alive as can be:
He almost told his daddy. He almost almost almost almost almost told him. Almost told him everything, almost spilled all the beans.
Almost told him about the big red fish truck, and the man with white hair, almost told him about the three thousand little catfish, almost told him he d hung something in Mister Cortez s pond this afternoon that had broken his line. But when his daddy asked him where his casting plug was, Jimmy just told him that he d taken it off. Which was no lie.
A Miracle of Catfish may stop before the end, but there s no almost about it.
It s real and beautiful and complete.
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