From My Bookshelf: Dirty Work

Dirty Work was Larry's Brown's first novel, and I don't think he ever wrote something as compelling, experimental, and startling as this book. The plot sounds almost too contrived -- two old soldiers in a VA hospital, one white and one black -- struggle with the horrific wounds they suffered years earlier in the Vietnam War. Slowly they come to tell each other the history of their sufferings and the pain of living with their injuries. 

If I remember right, there's some controversy about this book, for a couple of reasons. First, it's a book about the Vietnam War, or at least veterans of that war, written by an author with limited access to the war. Secondly, it's told in alternating points of view -- between the black and white man. So, what you've got here is a white author writing in a black voice, for much of the book. 

Well it's an experimental novel all around; it's just not your regular type of novel. (And shouldn't all novels be experimental?) And for that reason alone, I can forgive Brown for any type of transgression he may be making by writing across race. In general, I don't think it's a good idea. But as experiment, I think it's healthy. Now I can't assess whether Brown's black voice here is authentic, but I would argue that's not the point. All novels are artificial, all the voices contrived. The point is not to make something like life; the point is to make something more than life, or what's usually called Art. 

This book succeeds in that regard, tremendously. Brown borrows (as so many writers have) from Faulkner with the double-narrator technique. I've always liked this because it gives the narrative such depth; and we aren't challenged to wonder what X character is seeing versus what Y character is seeing. We see the whole story from both sides; and the voices ring true to me, if not too different from all of Brown's voices -- strong, robust short sentences in Southern drawl, unadorned prose, clean, efficient.

The plot is slow-going, but the book isn't so much about what happens as what is said. They talk about religion, culture, sex, violence, their dismal pasts, their injuries, their dreams. These are rough, impoverished, achingly desperate individuals, and the question as a reader is 'How do they go on?' That really is what stuns me about the writing, and about this book. It's about how to go on living, or not, when the suffering is so intense, so void of humanity. You have these two poor souls (not treated with any sentimentality) drinking through a long night of conversation and remembrance, and there they are, struggling with the most base of questions under the direst of circumstances: what makes this life worth living when so much of it is pointless suffering?