My Brother Michael
Out of the shotgun of a West Florida mill town comes this extraordinary novel of love and redemption as told by revisionist historian Gabriel Catts. On the eve of his fortieth birthday Gabe takes his own history in hand in an attempt to reconcile a family shattered by his betrayal of his older brother, Michael. As Gabe contends with a host of personal demons, he recounts his lifelong love for his brother’s wife, Myra — whose own demons threaten to overwhelm all three of them.
Gabe recalls their childhood lives in the poor neighborhood called Magnolia Hill, when their tranquil days of church picnics and porch gossip were spiked with a tragedy too evil to name. While Gabe escapes to academe in the Northeast, fleeing the poverty and inertia of their mill-town upbringing, Michael remains at home and manages to become an important person in the community.
From Library Journal
Despite a slightly irregular storyline, this first novel is certain to create a loyal readership for Owens. The narrative voice of Gabriel Catts, who relates the story of his lifelong love for his brother’s wife, is nothing short of stunning. Myra, loved by both Gabriel and his brother, Michael, lives a life irrevocably tainted by a childhood of abuse and incest at the hands of her father. Added to the characters’ other emotional demons-insanity and infidelity-the story could have been a dark and depressing one. Instead, because Owens depicts these demons against the backdrop of Southern cultural and familial restrictions that ultimately offer salvation, the story is one of quiet victory. Recommended for libraries with Southern fiction collections.
Susan C. Colegrove, Athens Regional Lib. System, Ga.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A luminously written first novel that celebrates–not always convincingly–a surviving sibling’s redemption and gratitude. When younger brother Gabe Catts comes home to north Florida for his brother Michael’s funeral, he’s been drinking, and he soon flees the family and heads back to New York, where he teaches college. Gabe is overcome by more than conventional grief, it seems, and the story he tells is as much a journey of self- discovery as of brotherly love and destructive jealousy. It begins in the small neighborhood of Magnolia Hill, where Gabe grew up and where his mother still lives. His father was a millworker. He had two siblings, a sister, Candace, and then Michael, named (like Gabe) after an angel. Next door, in a tumbledown house, lived the Sims–a mother and father with two children, Ira and Myra. Gabe falls in love with Myra. But the Simses are different: Dad beats up Ira and sexually abuses Myra, and when Dad is arrested, the family moves away. Meanwhile, Michael, a promising baseball player, turns down offers and stays home to help his parents, and Gabe, who’s never forgotten Myra, goes on to college and graduate school. Myra comes back to Magnolia Hill and soon marries Michael, a union that the self-absorbed Gabe finds tough to accept. He flees north, combining a successful academic career with bouts of heavy, near- suicidal, drinking. Having taken time off to write a book, he returns home once more, seduces and impregnates Myra, by now being treated for schizophrenia, then flees when his betrayal is discovered. Ten years later, dying from cancer, Michael asks Gabe to look after his family. He also leaves him a lot of money, and with some bumps along the way, Gabe finds both happiness and his soul, just as his brother had hoped. A bit too schematic, but a refreshingly different take on fraternal rivalry. — Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
“Owens fine writing and the ring of her natural voice will carry readers along like a tale told on a porch on a sultry Southern night.”
From Southern Living
“Owens deftly spins this convoluted tale of love’s redeeming powers, and with it she clearly adds her name to the roll of promising new authors.”
“Of all the novels written about families, very few have been able to make the reader blood kin. My Brother Michael does this, in depth and power. To an almost worked-out tradition Janis Owens brings an astonishing renewal.” James Dickey
“Janis Owens is one of the finest novelists of our time.” Pat Conroy
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