The Rabbit Factory: A Novel [Paperback]

Grimly realistic, tragic-absurd and raunchy, Brown's latest novel returns to his deep South fictional territory and to the characters-poor, largely uneducated, hard-drinking, cigarette and dope smoking-that he portrays so well. This time he juggles a large cast with one thing in common: they're long-time losers whose paths intersect in or near Memphis. Arthur is nearly 70, impotent and fearful of losing his sexy younger wife, Helen. She tries to seduce teenaged Eric, a pet shop employee who fled his abusive father's rabbit factory-a metaphor for the uncaring world in which these people exist. Anjalee is a prostitute who smites the heart of Wayne, a navy boxer. Domino has survived a prison term and now works butchering meat for a gangster named Mr. Hamburger, who sells it to a man who owns lions. Trouble is, the body of one of Mr. Hamburger's victims turns up in the meat locker, which complicates Domino's extracurricular job dealing weed over the border in Mississippi. The plot includes several murders, lots of sex, domestic spats and plenty of action in bars. Even the violent scenes veer close to farce. Dogs figure prominently, one of them a pit bull named Jada Pickett. Miss Muffet, who is the housekeeper for one of the spoiled canines, has a plastic leg. Yet even with the advantage of Brown's keen eye for the absurdities of life and for the habits of people who live on the edge, the book fails to deliver the punch of his earlier works. Fay, his most accomplished novel to date, was darker, but one could identify with the protagonist. Here, the characters are all self-absorbed and incessantly whiny, and their obsessive rambling thoughts are recounted in numbing detail. Readers will understand well before the end that these sad lives will never go anywhere but down.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Brown is a much-beloved writer who was put on the literary map primarily by his very popular novel Joe (1991). His latest will not only please his fans but also win him new ones. There is a kind of southern literary tradition for novelists to go "big screen" by following the plights and exploits of a slew of wacky but indelibly colorful individuals all living in one community and by alternating back and forth among their stories as they come to terms with life in their own peculiar fashion. That is exactly the mode Brown chooses here as we observe hooker Anjalee; older man Arthur along with his younger, sexually dissatisfied wife, Helen; "gunslinger" Frankie and his just desserts; ex-prisoner Domino and his sordid attempts to make a go of it outside the big house; and other equally "attractive" men and women working out their own destinies even when love, sex, and money (or the lack of any or all of the three) get in their way. This is not a gentle community these people inhabit; violence is just around the corner, as are the cops. One hysterical scene is followed by another, all of them underlain with the philosophy that you gotta do what you gotta do to be able to do what you wanna do. Can't go wrong with a conviction like that, can you? Read and see. But you definitely can't go wrong with a novel that has dogs as fully developed characters in their own right. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Chris Offutt author of No Heroes Larry Brown has long been the biggest open secret in Southern literature. His characters leave the page to expose real lives fraught with love, anger, trouble, and laughter. The Rabbit Factory should give him the wide readership he deserves. Don't read this; open the book.

In an ambitious narrative structure reminiscent of Robert Altman's classic film Nashville, Larry Brown weaves together the stories of a sprawling cast of eccentric and lovable characters, each embarked on a quest for meaning, fulfillment, and love -- with poignant and uproarious results.

Set in Memphis and North Mississippi, The Rabbit Factory follows the colliding lives of, among others, Arthur, an older, socially ill-at-ease man of considerable wealth married to the much younger Helen, whose desperate need for satisfaction sweeps her into the arms of other men; Eric, who has run away from home thinking his father doesn't want him and becomes Arthur's unlikely surrogate son; and Anjalee, a big-hearted prostitute with her own set of troubles who crashes into the lives of the others like a one-woman hurricane.

Teeming with pitch-perfect creations that include quirky gangsters, colorful locals, seemingly straitlaced professors, and fast-and-loose police officers, Brown's spellbinding and often hilarious story is about the botched choices and missed chances that separate people -- and the tenuous threads of love and coincidence that connect them. With all the subtlety and surprise of life itself, the story turns on a dime from comical to violent to moving. Masterful, profound, and full of spirit, The Rabbit Factory is literary entertainment of the highest order.

Larry Brown was the author of eight previous books. A recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the University of North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe Prize, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, he passed away in 2004.

Chapter 1

The kitten was wild and skinny, and its tail looked almost broken, kind of hung down crooked. It had been around the neighborhood for several days, darting here and there, dodging traffic sometimes, and Arthur had been trying to catch it, setting the Havahart cage in the yard and baiting it with anchovies, but even though the kitten seemed desperately hungry, it would not enter the trap. It only sat and looked at the bait, and at them. But there was no big rush. Arthur had plenty of money and plenty of time to mess with stuff like that whenever he wasn't sitting in front of the big-screen TV watching westerns. Sometimes he dozed off.

He brought his coffee to the love seat where Helen was watching through the big bay window. Outside was late afternoon, cold and wind, a cloudy sky, no sun. A few cars passed out on South Parkway. She hadn't switched to whiskey yet, was just having some red wine so far, holding her glass in both hands. Arthur sat carefully down with her. Snow was dusting down in the yard, tiny flakes whirling in the chilly breezes. He could see it swirling across the street. It was cozy there next to her and he thought maybe he could get it up today, if he got the chance.

"I think it smells us," she said.

Arthur sipped his coffee and with her looked at the kitten. He kept thinking maybe he could find something that would occupy some of her time. He thought maybe she'd like a cat, so he was trying for one.

"What do you mean 'smells us'? We're in here. It's out there. How can it smell us?"

"I don't mean in here, silly. I mean maybe it smells us on the trap. Our scent."

Scent, Arthur mused. He guessed it was possible. Just about anything was possible, looked like. Even getting to be seventy. He'd charged the trap to his American Express card and he'd seen drinks from the Peabody bar again on last month's statement. She seemed to be going over there a lot lately. He tried to get her to always take cabs since the trouble with the police. Sometimes she did.

"Don't you know anything about trapping?" she said.

"Hm? No," said Arthur. "But I'll bet you do." She knew a bit of information about a lot of things. She could converse on different subjects. She could converse fluently on penile dysfunction. She'd read a booklet about it, and he thought she might have seen a television program about it as well. She could watch the bloodiest show on TV, The Operation, and he didn't want to be in the same room with it. He wondered where else she went to drink besides the Peabody. She never told him anything.

"Well," she said. "I read a book by somebody. Trappers have to cover their scent or the animals will smell them and go away. They have to boil their traps in wood ashes and things like that to remove their scent. They have to wear gloves, and if they're trapping something really smart, like a wolf or a coyote, they can't even touch the ground."

Arthur glanced at her. It was plain to anybody that she was a lot younger than him. He knew other men looked at her. He knew for a fact without having any way of proving it besides hiding in the lobby ferns and spying on her that she talked to strange men at the Peabody.

"Come on. How can they trap if they don't touch the ground?"

"They have to put down something to kneel on."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Some old sacks or something."

"Do they have to boil the sacks?"

"I don't know."

"You think we need to boil our trap?"

"I just think it smells us. Look at the way it keeps watching us."

Arthur watched the kitten watching them for a while.

"You don't even have a pot big enough to boil it in," he said. "That thing's two feet long. How about spraying some Lysol on it?"

Helen gave him her patient look and sipped her wine. He remembered a time when she'd clamp her lovely muscular thighs around his back like the jaws of a new bear trap. She'd be gasping, with her head thrown back and her mouth opening and closing and her fingers in his hair yanking, going, Oh my God, baby! That was a long time ago, true. Way back in Montana. Still.

"Be serious," she said.

"I am serious. I already bought some cat food, didn't I? I already spent fifty-two dollars and fifty cents for the trap, didn't I?"

They sat studying the kitten. It walked around the wire box, looked back at them, sniffed at the contraption. Finally it sat again in the dead grass and stared at the anchovies. Maybe its tail was just deformed.

"Looks like if it was hungry it would go on in there," Arthur said.

"It's got to be hungry. Look how skinny it is."

"How are you going to tame it down even if we catch it?"

"I'll cure it with kindness, I guess."

"What if it claws you? You ever been attacked by a cat?"

"No, but I know you have."

"They can be pretty vicious if they get mad."

"That's true."

"They can whip a grown dog if they make up their mind to."

"I've heard that."

"And if you get scratched, why then you've got that cat-scratch fever to worry about. Like in this Ted Nugent song I heard one time."

"Well, if I get scratched, I'll put some peroxide on it."

"Or alcohol," Arthur said, and sipped his coffee. They stayed there for a quiet period of time, just watching the kitten. Arthur looked at Helen, but Helen didn't look at him. He sat there a little longer. Her slip was sticking out just a bit past her knee. Arthur very smoothly moved his hand over to her knee. He didn't need any Viagra pill to schedule a hard-on for him. She just had to get him in the right mood.

"Now, now," she said, and flipped her skirt down and moved his hand. He returned his gaze to the kitten. It was all about blood, he thought. Pressure up, pressure down. He'd read somewhere that some guys had little rubber bivalves that had been surgically implanted and were hidden back behind their nuts. Pump it up, let it out, like an inner tube. He didn't even want to think about doing something like that to himself.

"I don't think it's going to let us catch it," he said. Damned if he hadn't gotten all upset again, thinking about how everything had turned out. "I think I'll go find a coffee shop and get some fresh ground." Helen didn't say anything. Maybe it was time for him to give it up. But it was hard to let go. So very hard to let go. Probably even when you got as old as old Mr. Stamp.

Copyright ©2003 by Larry Brown

Chapter 2

Later, near nightfall, he was in a coffee shop near Cooper and Young, sipping a cup, sitting on a stool. He was the only patron besides a drunk guy in a trench coat who was keeping quiet and minding his own business with a crossword puzzle, but he could see people passing on the sidewalk. The owner was reading The Commercial Appeal, shaking his bald noggin.

"Dickheads," he said, and turned the paper over.

Arthur wondered if maybe there was some place in Memphis where a person could rent a tranquilizer gun, load it with one of those darts like they used to knock out animals in Africa they wanted to study, or a big cat in a zoo when they wanted to work on its teeth, maybe just get a small, low-dosage dart, nothing too big, something for a kitten, hell, he reasoned, you wouldn't need anything big enough to knock down a rogue tusker.

He could imagine himself hiding behind a tree in their yard with a tranquilizer gun, waiting for a clean shot at the kitten. But he couldn't figure out how they'd tame it. He wondered if it would work to sedate it and hog-tie it and then force-pet it.

He looked across the street. His eyes were old but he could see people inside a barbershop. A barber was moving around somebody's head. It seemed late to be getting a haircut. The drunk guy in the trench coat put the crossword puzzle and a nubby pencil in his pocket and some money on the counter and weaved his way out.

But what if only somebody like a veterinarian could get his hands on those dart guns? Maybe they were federally regulated, like machine guns. It probably wasn't something you could just buy over the counter. There couldn't be too much demand from the general public for an item like that. He worried over it and was glad to have it to worry over. It kept him from thinking about his repeated recent failures at getting into Helen's exquisite bush. He couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten a boner, and wished he'd written it down. The stripper he'd visited hadn't done him any good. The doctor had mentioned vacuum pumps once. That sounded just a little bit dangerous. Plus, he didn't like anybody messing with his jewels.

He ordered a cup to go and looked across the street. A man in a trench coat stood on the sidewalk. It looked like the drunk guy again, but it was hard to tell from here. The owner set the coffee in front of Arthur and he pulled a dollar from his pocket for a tip and put it on the counter. He picked up the cup and his fresh ground, walked out, checked his watch, had to get on home quick, shit, The Wild Bunch was fixing to come on at seven.

Copyright ©2003 by Larry Brown

Chapter 3

The barbershop was not crowded. One sleepy old man in a white coat droned on a nappy couch, slumped sideways, his polishing kit beside him, brown stains on the tips of his interlaced fingers. The gray-haired barber moved on rubber soles gently around the man in the barber's chair, his keen scissors making almost soundless snips as locks of hair drifted onto the floor and the pin-striped sheet wrapped around his customer.

The man in the raised chair seemed at peace. The barber had just finished lathering his face with hot foam and the rich smell of it hung in an aromatic veil over customer as well as attendant. The tiles on the floor were green and white, a checkerboard of odd colors.

The man in the chair had his eyes closed. He had a deep tan -- maybe from Miami? -- and his finely manicured hands where they held each other in stillness were small for such a heavy man. An ancient plastic radio in the ...