Helpful Score: 1
This third installment in Rick Bragg's family saga wobbles a bit at first, but quickly gets its legs under it as Bragg searches for a new understanding of the father he remembered only as a disruptive force who came and went with the violence of a hurricane.
What he found, through the eyes and voices and memories of relatives and childhood friends was a child born to a family of hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-fisted men, a child who grew into a boy of stubbornness and pride and a refusal to give an inch, and a boy who became a man touched early and often by the liquor and violence that had nurtured him.
Bragg intersperses these interviews with brief vignettes about becoming a father unexpectedly in his forties, when he married a woman with three boys, the youngest only five when Bragg began courting their mother. Somehow, the contrast between this child, growing up without his father present, and Bragg himself making the same journey but in very different shoes, drove him to want to learn more about the angry ghost who had for so long haunted his life.
What he finds does not lead to a Hallmark Movie Moment of forgiveness and redemption, but it does allow him to discover a man whose memory he can live with and whose struggles he acknowledges. Along the way, Bragg produces his powerful and lyric prose, dragged up from his soul and hammered into a thing of beauty on the page.
Bragg understands innately that time and place create the man. His descriptions of the brutal, man-eating cotton mills of the mid-20th century South equal anything Upton Sinclair ever wrote about the killing floors of Chicago's meat-packing houses, threaded through with a dark and terrible poetry thrown in at no extra charge. He writes of times and places that no longer exist, acknowledging both their beauty and their cruelty, with the understanding that both of those forces created the man who fathered, loved, disappointed, and abandoned him.
Taken together, All Over But the Shoutin, Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown are monumental as portraits of a vanished way of life, and a heartbreakingly real story of an American family.
What he found, through the eyes and voices and memories of relatives and childhood friends was a child born to a family of hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-fisted men, a child who grew into a boy of stubbornness and pride and a refusal to give an inch, and a boy who became a man touched early and often by the liquor and violence that had nurtured him.
Bragg intersperses these interviews with brief vignettes about becoming a father unexpectedly in his forties, when he married a woman with three boys, the youngest only five when Bragg began courting their mother. Somehow, the contrast between this child, growing up without his father present, and Bragg himself making the same journey but in very different shoes, drove him to want to learn more about the angry ghost who had for so long haunted his life.
What he finds does not lead to a Hallmark Movie Moment of forgiveness and redemption, but it does allow him to discover a man whose memory he can live with and whose struggles he acknowledges. Along the way, Bragg produces his powerful and lyric prose, dragged up from his soul and hammered into a thing of beauty on the page.
Bragg understands innately that time and place create the man. His descriptions of the brutal, man-eating cotton mills of the mid-20th century South equal anything Upton Sinclair ever wrote about the killing floors of Chicago's meat-packing houses, threaded through with a dark and terrible poetry thrown in at no extra charge. He writes of times and places that no longer exist, acknowledging both their beauty and their cruelty, with the understanding that both of those forces created the man who fathered, loved, disappointed, and abandoned him.
Taken together, All Over But the Shoutin, Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown are monumental as portraits of a vanished way of life, and a heartbreakingly real story of an American family.
