Larry Brown's A Miracle of Catfish

Larry Brown knows his territory. If ever there's been an author who wrote of what he knows, and who he knows, it's Larry Brown.
He's at his best when he's giving the reader the thought processes of the characters. If you're a child of The South yourself, you know it's real.
I started with Larry Brown in 1994. There was mention of him in an article in Time or Newsweek about a new crop of Southern writers, and the name stuck with me. Then I saw his short story collection called Big, Bad, Love at the Hoover Library. I've been a Larry Brown fan ever since.
I met him twice at book signings. The first time was in 1994 at the Barnes & Noble in Hoover. He was sigining the paperback printing of On Fire.
The second time was in September of 2003, the last time I saw him, when he was signing Rabbit Factory at Books-A-Million at Brookwood Mall.
At the latter signing, he said there would be a sequel to Fay. Well, I guess we'll never see that! I asked him if he still kept in touch with Harry Crews, his inspiration, and he said no, he had not talked to Crews in a long time. That's what I remember about my last encounter with Larry.
A Miracle of Catfish is as good as it gets. This is Southern writing at its best by a writer who is control of his element.
In Larry Brown's South, it seems like everyone smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and lives in a trailer. If you grew up in the South, even if none of these things fits you, you understand what he's talking about as these people struggle to maintain a decent existence.
There is a Southern Gothic element in this particular novel when Cortez Sharp wonders what to do with his dead wife and waits until the next morning to make the necessary calls. I don't remember Brown employing Gothic before. And did Cortez really poison Queen and bury her in the woods so that daughter Lucinda wonders what happened to her? In the rural South, do we always know where all of the bodies are buried?
I wonder about the inclusion of Tourettes Syndrome. Albert is delightful, but what is the point of him having Tourettes Syndrome?
You laugh at Brown's characters. You feel sorry for them. Most of all, even though you feel like you know these people, you are glad you are NOT like them. How awful to live the life of a Larry Brown character!
This is vintage Larry Brown. I liked the book all the way through except that I was let down at the end. It's not that it's unfinished; it's that I was let down by his notes for how he would have ended it.
The problems is that he so many characters and things going on in this novel. How could he have neatly wrapped it all up with every character? I don't think he could have and based on the page of notes, he wouldn't have wrapped it up well.
What happened to Lacey?
Would Lacey have forced him to face his paternity? Surely she would have.
Why would Albert have died?
The big fish?
The fish man in the red truck?
Too many details. Maybe too many story lines. Too ambitious a novel?
But still because it's Larry Brown I loved it.
I wish he could have finished it.