An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings

by Harry Crews

The newest book out from the creator of SOUTHERN GOTHIC, HARRY CREWS! The first novel in over eight years.

Genres: Fiction, Horror

115 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2006

About the author

Harry Eugene Crews was born during the Great Depression to sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. His father died when he was an infant and his mother quickly remarried. His mother later moved her sons to Jacksonville, Florida. Crews is twice divorced and is the father of two sons. His eldest son drowned in 1964.

Crews served in the Korean War and, following the war, enrolled at the University of Florida under the G.I. Bill. After two years of school, Crews set out on an extended road trip. He returned to the University of Florida in 1958. Later, after graduating from the master's program, Crews was denied entrance to the graduate program for Creative Writing. He moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he taught English at Broward Community College. In 1968, Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published. Crews returned to the University of Florida as an English faculty member.

In spring of 1997, Crews retired from UF to devote himself fully to writing. Crews published continuously since his first novel, on average of one novel per year. He died in 2012, at the age of 78.

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a miracle Harry was even alive by this late date, much less offering us one final novel(la). Sure, it isn't going to blow back whatever hair you have remaining all that much, but those Crewsian rhythms are just fine totting around the track in one last glory. Damn, not like he didn't earn it.

And there is much to like here, so far as your familiar with Crews' work and the depth to be found elsewhere (read: not a helluva lot here). It's profanity, cruelty, and just general meanness read like one last bird-flung 'fuck you' from a writer who had spent a healthy amount of his career in opposition. Harry never sold a lot of books, but we legionatics are as devout as any cult that e'er was. No, that is not a real word.

How do I like my blue-eyed boy, Harry? I love ya, you sonofabitch.

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like some violent bizarro Looney Tunes metaphor about true transcendent balls-out American Romance that is over before it begins. Similar to nightmare roller coaster ride films like Beau is Afraid and Possession which possess that squirrelly shifting dream logic that keeps you asking if what you’re seeing is real or just playing out in someone’s head. Sure, it’s funny too, and sad and scary and well written and desperate. Kind of like what it feels like to be a part of an American family. Oh, wait…there it is.

[Snakes · Rating 1 out of 5]

So that's two Crew's books and two pieces of utter garbage. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong ones (Both I've read are from later in his career). This one was equally as ludicrous as the last one. The plot is extremely disjointed almost as if the author had a stroke at several points in the book. The characters are completely unbelievable. Their behavior and dialog is just ridiculous. The only saving grace on this one was the length. Short and terrible.

[Matthew Snope · Rating 4 out of 5]

My father was kind enough to give me some money credit on amazon.com so I got Harry Crews' latest (2006). I'm a devout Crews fan and have a tattoo to prove it. I enjoyed An American Family. It's not Crews' best (I would reserve that for Karate is a Thing of the Spirit; A Feast of Snakes; The Gospel Singer; This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven; and some of his essays in Classic Crews), but it was worth reading. Stranger and shorter than most of his books, it has a Hemingway-esque lean/meanness to it and a strong sense of the absurd, dreamlike, and casually violent. I don't want to give away the ending but I will say it shows a marked shift in Crews' usual mindset and outlook. I found it a compelling read that never had a bogged-down middle because of its brevity as a novel, or novella/short novel/novellete/whatever. I want my estranged wife to read it. I'm looking forward to reading Crews' follow-up to A Childhood (if he publishes it), and some of his earlier novels (Hawk is Dying; Naked in Garden Hills) if I can find them cheap enough or someone willing to give them to me or swap 'em.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. I hate to diss Harry Crews because he's one of my all-time favorites but this, possibly (sadly) the last book he'll publish in his life (I hear he's in poor health) is a mess. His trademark violence is too overwrought here. The humor too unfunny. And even his usual trusty narrative skills are sloppy and often inexplicable.
But still, even a bad book can't stop my love for the man. Please, everyone: Read Feast of Snakes, Body, A Childhood, or even Celebration (his last good book published by a big house).

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

"This is the most terrible thing in the world! This is the most beautiful thing in the world!"

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one gets some sad reviews, bullshit its hilarious.

[Stephen Roberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

One written strictly for the money it would seem. Crews previously wrote about the shifting power dynamics in a relationship (sexual and otherwise), and did it better than in this novella, which includes a sudden and violent demise of a character for no particular reason that I could fathom. The book almost reads like a first rough draft of Scar Lover, although there are echoes of Celebration and All We Need of Hell also. Strictly for the Crews completist.

[Kiara Pornan · Rating 4 out of 5]

first book of the new year, and my first Crews. more short story or novella than novel proper. i really enjoyed this and am rereading it tomorrow, then will read The Gospel Singer, and then maybe Feast of Snakes or his memoir. i’m hooked, that’s all.

[Wampus Reynolds · Rating 2 out of 5]

By far the worst Harry Crews book I've read. It seems like a sketch of a novel that he sent out to the publisher to fulfill a contract. A weird anomaly in his career.

Very quick read.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally found a copy of this. Its Crews at the end of his career- not his best work but if u love him, u will be ok with it. Story actually pretty solid.

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a time when I lived in Gainesville, Florida, was in the process of becoming a student at the University of Florida where Harry taught, I'd signed up for a course (summer session...I'd just rolled my used pick-up and school seemed like a viable alternative to late nights and whatnot) but alas, I was informed that the course (a creative writing course) was not available...for whatever reason...I think it was an act of Congress...or the president (Reagan)....so...or maybe one needed permission from the man himself...yeah, I think that was it...permission required. So...

...in the dark of night, I headed north on 13th...must be hell to be a published writer...you have people like me showing up at odd hours, hoping to plead their case. Deep space cowboys. Heh! So, there's this small dog yapping, it is dark, Harry's house is built on stilts, tin roof, a bit of a porch, I leave the lights on on the Pontiac LeMans I was driving, a '74, purchased when I got out of the service, shortly before following the sun to Florida.

...knock knock knock. The dog has not stopped barking. He? She? is on a rope of some sort, and surprisingly, for 13th Street, the area was not nutt-to-butt houses, lots of foilage around, dark as I said. Knock knock knock. Nothing.

I head back to the car, the door was left open, and I turn to look one more time at the dark windows.

"You looking for something, dude!"

I mean, you have to look at a pic of Harry, but I figured it was him. Couldn't see anyone so I addressed the dark:

Yeah, I'm looking for Harry Crews!

This man opens the screen door and bounds down the steps...he is dressed in a white bathrobe and I'm thinking, oh shit, he was taking a shower...there goes any chance of taking his course this summer.

Anyway, I explain what I'm doing there, he says they aren't going to have the course this summer, and I look at the dirt and say damn. He didn't seem too broke up about it, barefoot in the dark, said something matter-of-fact like yeah they decided or yeah there wasn't enough...something.

Eventually, I was able to take a couple? one?...I spent time in one of the "creative writing" courses there and I don't think I suffered because of it. And now this story.

Begins:

It was Sunday, Major Melton's second wedding anniversary. As soon as he opened his eyes he heard the demented barking of the pit bulldog. Then all the way from the other room he smelled the baby.

Onward and upward.

Another note...I listened to a cassette that the Gainesville Public Library had on hand. On tape, Harry relates the time he hitchhiked to Jacksonville, Florida to see Frank Slaughter...I dunno....for inspiration perhaps. Slaughter was taking a shower.

The horror....the horror...

Update, complete, Tuesday evening, 9:12 p.m.e.s.t.



I should have typed out more of the story opener, for that 1st paragraph is the story in a paragraph.

Here's all of it:

It was Sunday, Major Melton's second wedding anniversary. As soon as he opened his eyes he heard the demented barking of the pit bulldog. Then all the way from the other room he smelled the baby. The baby boy with the strange markings. The dog's barking got louder. Curled beside him under the thin blanket, his wife farted briefly as she snored counterpoint to the sound of the dog. He knew the dog was probably as crazy as it was ever going to get by now. Poor bastard. Major was sympathetic. The dog had gone berserk from being tied on a leash that was too short. Major's own problem exactly, which hardly made him or the dog unique. Everybody he knew was going quietly mad from being tied on a leash that was too short.

Good story...pleete and replete w/so many of the ways and means of his other stories.

There are some echoes from his other stories...All We Need of Hell,Celebration,Scar Lover others...and this story is certainly undeserving of the reviews I've read here. I opened it, read it in one sitting, the story held me for the time it took to go from point a to point z.

I seem to recall a line from one of Crews's stories, something like, there's nothing like the taste of your own blood to get rid of all the erroneous bullshit floating through your mind...or if not that particular line, then that mindset is certainly present in many of the characters that he has written about. Major is bled, more than once, and though there is pain involved, it seems expected, natural and the order of things.

This story has blood...there's even a line about hawks or some sort of bird-of-prey that only go to water when they are in ill health...they drink blood.

And this story is not without that wonderful moment of grace at the end. Who could ask for more?

[Alex V. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. OK this book is short, like short-story short and though I loathe to bring up William Burroughs now that I am no longer 19 nor nervously intrigued by extreme possibilities that form the antithesis of my placid life, this little romp of sexless sex and torture and mayhem reminds me of my favorite part in Naked Lunch , where a brother and sister are acting out a stark tableau of brutality on a gallows platform. This also reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, it's weird, inappropriate sit-around-the-cracker-barrel air of some of the dialog while unspeakable acts were unfolding.

The narrative here quickly goes off the rails and as I darted through its sparse 100 pages, I wasn't sure I had a picture of what was really happening or why, and I think that's what stories like these are doing with their outrageous cruelty - wallowing in the pointlessness and reveling in the immediate cause-effect nature of life and realizing the big picture is easily erased when the blood starts to spill.

I don't know if this is a good book or not, since it was over so fast, but I will say it was a perfect way to blithely kill an hour waiting for your lovely family to get back from Target. Abject cruelty has its amusement factor.

I thought I had read Harry Crews before but a scan through his other title informed me I was mixing him up with Hubert Selby Jr. Maybe I just had the record by Harry Crews, a Sonic Youth side project from 1989, and assumed that I must've read it, since I was reading stuff like this back then. Maybe I just wanted to and finally did it after all these years, which is exactly the motivation for what happens in this book.

[Michael Whitaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This year is off to a great start; I've now read two separate books in single sittings. For that reason, I'll always love the short novel.

Anyhow. The story at hand...

It's strange to hold a copy of a book without 2,000 copies. After reading it, there's a reason it didn't have a wide audience. It was good ol' strange Harry Crews, but it was stranger, messier, and more violent than ever. It was a mess. It was a mad dash from one place to another with little sense, little thread reaching from beginning to end. Sadly, you sense this is it for Crews. You read it and you think, "Of course this was his last book."

But how fitting that in his last book, there is the line:

"What a beautiful, terrible world."

My first experience with Crews was "Celebration" and I love that novel to this day. Too Much is too much. Since then, I've read several of his works with varying levels of enjoyment, but I can't help but respect him. He says writing is good to the extent that it is clear and specific and bad to the extent it is abstract and vague. And he proves himself correct every time. Even his worst work comes alive. Sometimes it is cartoonish, but the type of cartoon that is too real, too raw to be seen live and in the flesh. And even the moments that seem false tend to seem false because of a lack of depth of understanding and grace on the reader's part.

Reading Crews was my first time realizing that not just some, but all people have a desperation inside them. Often something ugly and lovely and wild. He always goes there and that's why I never stop reading.

What a beautiful, terrible world. May more writers explore with as much courage as Harry Crews always did.


Now on to "the Gospel Singer."

Amen.

[Winter Branch · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book about the baby with the curious markings is a bit of let down when held up against Crews previous works. It is even more disappointing when realizing that this is his most recent book in 8 years.
The book is over-the-top violent and bloody. The idea for a story is here, it is just scattered and seems to skip large chunks of the plot disorientating the reader. One explanation is that this was done on purpose since Major Melton (the main character) did not have a clue what was happening to him throughout the entire novel.
The book shares too much in common with his other novels like Feast of Snakes and Celebration but lacks the depth and impact of those older works.
The violence and absurdity of the story will keep you reading, though, because you'll want to know what the hell is going on. The end will only further confound you.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weird, violent, short, humorous, humorless hard to make much out of it ---book. My first Crews, and if I didn't hear a lot of his earlier work was good, it would be my last. Yet, not uninteresting in a, well, weird way.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my goodness! That's all.

[Magnus Ver Magnusson · Rating 1 out of 5]

The publisher that agreed to publish this should be rolled up in a huge carpet and run over a half dozen times by a monster truck. He would be getting off easy.

[Titus Burley · Rating 2 out of 5]

An angry, strange, violent, dysfunctional little book... which is obviously what it is intended to be. But it lacks the soul and charm and redeeming value of most of Harry's work.

[Jon Abbey · Rating 3 out of 5]

there isn't enough Harry Crews in this world, all of it is well worth reading, but this is definitely one of the lesser ones. barely 100 pages with very little type on each page...

[Kmalbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't see the point of this book. Random vulgarity and marital violence.