Dirty Work: A Novel [Paperback]

Two devastatingly wounded Vietnam vets, Chaney, who is black, and James, white, both sons of the South, lie in a veteran's hospital and talk freely about combat, movies, sex, old loves, their boyhoods, how it feels to kill a man and why God allows wars to happen. PW described this novel as "wrenching" and "memorable."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

There has been no anti-war novel . . . quite like Dirty Work.The New York Times (The New York Times )

A novel of the first order. . . . A gem.The Washington Post (The Washington Post )

Explodes like a land mine. . . . A marvelous book.The Kansas City Star (The Kansas City Star )

A real knockout.New York Newsday (Newsday )

Dirty Work is the story of two men, strangersone white, the other black. Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years later, the two men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital.Over the course of a day and a night, Walter James and Braiden Chaney talk of memories, of passions, of fate. With great vision, humor, and courage, Brown writes mostly about love in a story about the waste of war.

Larry Brown's shattering first novel is the story of two menstrangersone black, the other white. Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years later, both men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital. Over the course of a long day and night, they recount their memories, reveal their fears and their dreams, and ponder their fates, until each is irrevocably touched and transformed by the other's life. With great vision, humor, and courage, Brown writes of human tenderness in an unforgettable story about the waste of war.

Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life. At the age of thirty, a captain in the Oxford Fire Department, he decided to become a writer and worked toward that goal for seven years before publishing his first book, Facing the Music, a collection of stories, in 1988. With the publication of his first novel, Dirty Work, he quit the fire station in order to write fulltime. Between then and his untimely death in 2004, he published seven more books. His three grown children and his widow, Mary Annie Brown, live near Oxford.