A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed

by Jason Brown

The ten linked stories in Jason Brown's A FAITHFUL BUT MELANCHOLY ACCOUNT OF SEVERAL BARBARITIES LATELY COMMITTED follow John Howland and his descendants as they struggle with their New England legacy as one of the country's founding families and the decaying trappings of that esteemed past. Set on the Maine coast, where the Howland family has lived for almost 400 years, the grandfather, John Howland, lives in a fantasy that still places him at the center of the world. The next generation resides in the confused ruins of the 1960s rebellion, while many in the third generation feel they have no choice but to scatter in search of a new identity. Brown's touching, humorous portrait of a great family in decline earns him a place among the very best linked-story collections—James Joyce's Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Alice Munro's Beggar Maid and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.

Genres: Short Stories

186 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2019

About the author

Jason Brown grew up in Maine. He was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Oregon. He has published two books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton/Random House) and Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work (Open City/Grove Atlantic). His stories have won several awards and appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Harper’s, TriQuarterly and other magazines and anthologies. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. Jason’s forthcoming work includes a novel in stories called, A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, due out in the fall of 2019 and a novel called Outermark (pub date unknown).

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of stories, and as someone who is a transplant into Maine, this collection holds something especially dear to me. The places they spoke of were places I knew and the simplicity but richness of the detail was startling and beautiful. John J Howland was a continuous character but I came to feel frustrated with him, while his grandfather was such a live wire of a character I loved each story in which he took part. Sometimes the kinship lines were a bit unclear, but otherwise, the stories were well told, full of life and vigor, and never went quite were you expecting sometimes. Overall a very great collection that showcases the wonder and history and complicated nature of Maine, New England, and the families that live here.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an unbelievable collection of linked short stories. Funny, perceptive, sympathetic, dramatic and believable. This will appeal to fans of both contemporary and historical fiction.

[Lawson Cope · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't particularly care for the style of the prose, to be honest. And some of the content in the stories felt unnecessary.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frankly, I might have gotten into these stories a shade more than I did if the collection hadn't been touted (at all...see comment to come) as a linked collection, for the added overview of the family, and the dates, proved to me a burden that I simply had little gumption to wade through. Not that this is the first book to post up a family tree or overview in the opening pages, but here the pile of information felt heavy and distracting. I have a couple of stories I am probably going to put into personal storage to look at again later, but by halfway into the collection I was making myself fully cognizant of how much I still had to go. The linked story aspect of this book brought a little too much expectation as opposed to the thematic links in a collection like Dubliners, something the intro to this book touts as being nearly just as good.

Which brings me to another deflation this book brought me, which was that introduction. This is the second Missouri Review Books collection I've read, and I had the same problem with the previous, which is that the introductions do a disservice in their extravagant comparisons to Nobel Prize winners and, in this case, a classic short story collection like Joyce's. I'm all for a publisher being excited about their releases, but going to such lengths to PROVE the worth of their selections, which brings in an undertone of deflecting a reaction such as mine to an apparent lack of understanding of literature, just undermines the unique work of any writer, since I usually read a writer to appreciate THEIR style, not to be forced into accepting its place already among the Western canon. At least, to a contrarian like me.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aside from the mind-twister title, this is a swell book of linked short stories all centered on the fictional Howland clan of Maine. They range from the 1700s to 2012. The latest John Howland narrates five of the 10 tales as we watch him growing up with vacations at his grandparents’ home, maturing into a man struggling with addictions and anxieties. We meet a variety of terrific characters tied to each other by blood or geography. In each case, I would have been happy to read a few hundred more pages about these people. Brown’s style is easy-going yet full of great detail that takes us right into the appropriate time and place.

[Linda Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

btw, I am LINDA CAMPBELL FRANKLIN, but can't seem to get Goodreads to fix it.
I entered something in a Missouri Review contest, didn't win, but got a copy of this wonderful book of Linked Stories basically about the Howland Family, the village of Vaughn, and the Howland Island. The last story is in 1741, the first in 2003, but others are scattered in the 90s, 90s and 2000s. Takes a little getting used to, but very moving stories about an extended family through many generations who live on the Maine Coast. Linked stories are among my favorites, although I sometimes wish all of them had a family tree/map diagram either at the end or the beginning. This does have a list with dates, but I'd like arrows and direction lines. Maybe it's just my brain. The author Jason Brown, who grew up in Maine, has received several prizes for his stories and has published two collections. Now I have to read the others... Driving the Heart, from 1999, and Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (2007.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of linked stories was sometimes gently comic (when sneaking away early from a funeral with his cousin on the dubious mission to deliver a goat to an island, one character says, "having absorbed my fill of amateur sonnets and the banjo, I was just happy to be elsewhere") and sometimes piercingly sad (there's a story about a state home for abused children that is so specific it's hard to read.) While the tone of the stories shifts, they are consistently beautifully written with the members of the Howland story providing a faceted understanding of a particular area: an island and inland town in Maine.

[Karen Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This year’s Pushcart included a story by Jason Brown; I loved it, and when I found out it came from this collection of linked stories, I couldn’t order it fast enough. It combines humor with sorrow and loss, and examines how family ties and longstanding legacies can be both a guide and a millstone. Keep an eye on the boats; they carry a lot.

FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.