Audubon’s Watch
“Brown's ambition and achievement in Audubon's Watch
lie in the sensual effects of his ornate, overripe language. Again and again,
he pushes his style to the limit, with more than a nod to the stagy conventions
of the day. It's a brazen performance that few authors would have the skill
or the courage to risk.”
-- New York Times Book Review
“John Gregory Brown, much-praised author of The Wrecked,
Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur and Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery,
gives us Audubon's Watch, a compressed, highly charged novel that peels
away the familiar legend portion of the biography to explore the private mysteries
of memory, remorse and the redemption of pain...
Brown works against prevailing literary fashions; he is neither ironic nor oblique.
He has a way of writing scenes emblematically, allowing encounters to carry
a certain symbolic weight and making free with dramatic coincidence. At one
point during their vigil, for instance, Audubon gives Gautreaux a pocket watch
he'd bought years ago (hence the title) and which had long since stopped. He
gives it as a symbol, but as soon as Gautreaux takes possession, the timepiece
starts to work again. Sometimes--and why this should be is not always clear--the
obvious can exert subtle effects.
“Though elegantly and poetically written, the novel is quick with primal
energies and powerfully troubling themes. We catch the heat of Audubon's sexual
passion for Myra, and we probe the ancient questions about betrayal, forgiveness
and, centrally, the enigma of time and memory. As Gautreaux thinks, en route
to his rendezvous: ‘It is by means of memory, I believed, that man is
most human but as well possessed of an intimation of divinity, of that timeless
state where past and present and future become joined, indistinguishable one
from the other.’ Brown's novel, memory-driven, would keep us suspended
in that state for the duration of our reading.”
-- Los Angeles Times
“Pain brings with it truth, and true appreciation for
living. There are few light moments in these pages, but its meaningfulness provides
striking images and quiet lessons. John Gregory Brown unfurls the subtle details
of two lives with great delicacy and skill.”
-- New Orleans Times-Picayune
“John Gregory Brown's third novel focuses on the life
of the great ornithologist and artist John James Audubon. But to label it fictional
biography or historical fiction is to misrepresent the claim it makes on the
reader. Call it, rather, a meditation, a book that stands at the intersection
of poetry, fiction, and philosophy, or, better yet, a concerto in words, a work
that explores and develops a series of variations on themes and motifs that
ultimately merge, albeit uncomfortably, in order to return us to the dominant
key, which has to do with art and passion and knowledge and how they can guide
us ‘beyond this world to another realm’...
Brown's real project involves more than the construction of a Gothic mystery.
He is intent on nothing less than excavating the psyche of a man whose passion
for birds involved death (Audubon's studies required the killing of his subjects),
art, desire, and unfathomable mysteries that seem to lie at the very core of
his being. And of Gautreaux, as well, a man whose obsession with human anatomy
matches Audubon's passion for birds, who shrugs off the ancient taboo against
violating the dead and turns graverobber in order to satisfy his compulsive
need to ‘peer inside a human body, observe its organs, its skeleton, its
bright channels of blood.’
The two voices bob and weave around one another in a counterpoint heightened
by the resonance and studied artifice of Brown's prose. The novel's language,
lush and ornate, mirrors the emotional intensity of the Romantic Age during
which Audubon lived and worked. It flirts with the rhetorical conventions of
Victorian melodrama, which the murder plot suggests. And it manages to salvage
some sense of the mystery that has been bled from life by scientists (including
the heirs of Audubon) forever at war with the ambiguous and the inscrutable.
John Gregory Brown, a faculty member at Sweet Briar and the author previously
of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery and The Wrecked, Blessed Body
of Shelton LaFleur, aims high and once again hits the mark. Audubon's
Watch will not please those who like their novels to end with all the pieces
of the puzzle firmly in place. But readers who appreciate irony and the play
of language and ideas will see this as the rare tin of caviar in a K-Mart publishing
world.”
-- Richmond Times-Dispatch
The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur
“The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur
is a staggering achievement, John Gregory Brown’s complex portrait of
a man painted in prose of stark beauty...Brown is an astonishing writer; disturbing,
odd, but mindful always of the importance of narrative, his ample skills evident
in this curious, heartbreaking -- and deceptively simple -- story of a man broken
and bent but not beaten.”
-- The (London) Times
“The organizing constructs behind John Gregory Brown’s
dazzling second novel, The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur,
are paintings -- or rather, a series of paintings that Lafleur executes as a
talented and ultimately successful adult artist...It’s impossible to come
away from this novel with anything but admiration for the author -- especially
his imaginative command of language and narrative voice.”
-- Chicago Tribune
“In John Gregory Brown’s beautiful second novel
(after Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery) is a warm assent to the power
of acceptance and healing. The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur
not only endorses the healing faculty of art, but the capacity of ordinary people
to transform their lives into joyous celebrations.”
-- San Francisco Chronicle
“If William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor were
around to read The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur, they would
say that Brown has honored their legacy once again...The beauty of Brown’s
writing never interferes with the truth he is trying to achieve. It only amplifies
it...This novel is John Gregory Brown’s gift of grace to us.”
-- Los Angeles Times
“The mystery...isn’t revealed until the final page,
and it is wonderful reading along the way. Even if the plot had nothing to offer,
Brown’s melodic, haunting and rhythmic prose would be worth the read.”
-- Houston Chronicle
“The narrative adopts the dreamlike coloration of folk
art to evoke the pictures that Shelton, now a mournful old man, offers to us
as the chapters of his life. With a lyricism reminiscent of Porgy and Bess,
the novel animates an exotic time and place, filling it with vividly imagined
characters whose dignity in the face of suffering touches the heart.”
-- Boston Globe
“If you’re drawn to the timeless themes of Southern
literature -- race, family, loss and redemption - and to powerfully understated
prose, The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur will move you deeply...Brown’s
writing is sensitive and full of compassion.”
-- Charlotte Observer
“The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur
is about human passions, human relationships, the recovery of lost kin and the
struggle to create beauty, and as such it is a tale with universal appeal. As
a suspense story, the narrative builds to a gripping intensity. And it is all
told in an elegant, luminous prose that sweeps the reader along. John Gregory
Brown is a strong new voice in American (not just Southern) fiction, and his
work deserves the widest possible audience.”
-- Dallas Morning News
Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery
“John Gregory Brown’s compassionate vision of human
destiny is one that contains both suffering and the possibility of deliverance...For
a book like Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, the label ‘first
novel’ seems grudging and dismissive. Artistry like this is unclassifiable.”
-- New York Times Book Review
“I wish more people today would attempt books like this
one, novels that take on the big questions, the eternal verities, and, without
pretense and a whole lot of claptrap, address the difficulty of finding meaning
and significance in life. For this is the stuff of which classics are made and
what literature, certainly, is all about. That John Gregory Brown had the nerve
to square off before such issues in his first novel is by itself laudable. The
fact that he wrote a fine story with believable, memorable characters in the
process is reason for applause...
“The story is a moving one, and sorrowful because so ordinary and so familiar...The
refreshing thing about the book, in addition to the timelessness of the situation
the characters find themselves in, is that implicit in their struggle is the
assumption that all the effort is worth it, that there are such absolutes as
right and wrong, and that locating oneself in this common grid of guilt and
forgiveness is incumbent, part and parcel, of finding out who you are. In a
word, redemption.”
-- Los Angeles Times
“What Brown’s novel renders so elegantly is the
entrenchment of abandonment and sorrow, of deceit and mendacity, from one generation
to the next...Much of the magnificence of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery
is the result of the author’s decision to create imaginative voices other
than his own. Of the three narrators of his story, two are female and the third
is an African-American man. To use those voices must have been a challenge for
the writer, but the decision was a triumph for his novel. John Gregory Brown
is both the beneficiary of and a worthy successor to our finest Southern writers.”
-- Chicago Tribune
“In its Southern-ness, Brown’s novel has an antique
quality worth admiring and conserving. His Southerners take care in speaking
to each other. The conversations between black Southerners and whites are sometimes
of necessity wary and vigilant, but the characters are listening to each other.
Brown’s stretches of careful and melodious writing make his first novel
something much better than the proverbial promising debut.”
-- Washington Post
“Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery is a sensitive,
graceful piece of writing with an emotional candor about it that speaks well
for John Gregory Brown’s future life as a writer.”
-- Boston Globe
“Reading it is to rush willingly and excitedly across
a minefield, waiting for blasts of revelation...Brown is a dancing funambulist
of a writer who shifts back and forth between events.”
-- New Statesman and Society
“An intricate, musical elaboration and exploration...The
opening sentence [is] a small masterpiece in itself.”
-- San Francisco Chronicle
“Moving, wise, and wonderful...”
--The (London) Times