“The Late Matthew Brown fuses bureaucratic satire and domestic comedy as its hero proves himself late in myriad ways: late to fatherhood, late to self-discovery, and technically dead due to a paperwork glitch. It’s rare to see a story that faces this universal truth: to do nothing is also to do something, usually a drastic mistake. In this novel it takes a sass-mouthed tweenie whose very name is Hero to prove the point. Funny, touching, true—a delightful read.”
— Janet Burroway, awarded the Florida Humanities Council’s 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing, is the author of eight novels, plays, poetry, essays, texts for dance, and children’s books. Her Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (ninth edition) is the most widely used creative writing text in America.
“The Late Matthew Brown is a funny, smart, and ultimately deeply moving story about a man sleepwalking through his life, dragged awake by a newfound daughter and a realization of his own culpability as a human being. Paul Ketzle has written a wholly original novel, one that gallops along, crackling with satire and insight. With assured and incisive prose, Ketzle casts a skewering lens on a New South and its fast-and-loose relationship with its history. But it’s the novel’s flawed, lovable anti-hero, forced to reconcile the way he lives his life, who will stick with me for a long time. A debut of an exciting new literary voice.”
— Rae Meadows is the author of Calling Out. No One Tells Everything, Mercy Train, and I Will Send Rain
“The Late Matthew Brown chronicles the travails of a Florida bureaucrat who finds himself at the mercy of Hero, the daughter produced in a tryst he only vaguely remembers. Hero shows up twelve years later, a preternaturaly old-soul kid prone to arcane pronouncements and correcting her baffled father, who can only wonder at her power. I was reminded of the Sharon Olds poem, “The Only Girl at the Boys Party,” the way Hero stands alone, implacable and serene amidst a world of men trying desperately to make the math of life work. As the father of a young girl, I saw a glimpse of my future both harrowing and joyous. Paul Ketzle has written a sort of melancholy paean to fatherhood fused with a biting satire about the New South and its denizens with this ambitious debut novel.”
— Matt Bondurant, author of The Wettest County in the World, which was made into the film Lawless, and The Night Swimmer.
“Matthew Brown, an associate director from a family of government bureaucrats, has followed in his grandfather’s footsteps, finding early success in the State Department of Corrections. His career is empty, repetitive, but filled with tradition. Into this world comes Hero, like a blaze of truth, a long-lost daughter to teach him who he really is, what he might become. Beautifully observed and filled, with lush images and surprising characters, The Late Matthew Brown presents a new voice in Southern Literature—Paul Ketzle, who knows how to lay down a sentence like a poem and work a paragraph with intrigue until it reveals the yearnings of a character’s heart.”
— Todd James Pierce, author of Drue Heinz Literature Prize winning Newsworld and The Australia Stories.
The Late
Matthew Brown
The Late
Matthew Brown
Paul Ketzle
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland
Copyright © 2015 by Paul Ketzle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-051-6
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62720-052-3
Design: Lorena Trejo-Perez
Cover art: Shadow 62x117 Oil on Canvas by René Romero Schuler, represented by Jennifer Norback Fine Art, Chicago and Paris. Section icons by creative commons - attribution (CC BY 3.0) the noun project.
Author photo: Brian Kubarycz
Published by Apprentice House
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.apprenticehouse.com [email protected]
for Lyra and Raia
for daughters in search of fathers
for fathers in search of daughters
for all those simply searching
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer”
—W.B. Yeats
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
—Oscar Wilde
In Media Res
Across the pool deck, my daughter lies stretched out on a towel far from the water’s edge, head bobbing to earphones that barely contain the noise, pretending to idly thumb the pages of a magazine while she watches the swarming masses around her through the corners of her yellow sunglasses. Unmistakably, unapologetically twelve.
All around us along the patio, the lives of other families overflow. Children scurry between the worn, scattered lawn chairs and sunning elderly men whose dimpled heads shine, bright and blinding. Young and hyper and semi-medicated, the kids shriek as they play, the pitch of fright and uncontainable joy, tossing themselves hurly-burly into the shallows. The air resonates with the call and echo: Marco. Polo. Marco. Polo. Rascals dodge and duck, burn toes on the concrete, deftly slide across pale blue tile. They ignore the posted signs and bored warnings from lifeguards. They pierce the water’s surface, human cannonballs and arrows, so slick and deadly. The only survivors are the balanced and the silent.
These are the fleets of summer, reliable and trying as the season. I watch them, water level, reclined and adrift upon my inner tube, seared by the heat. From this position, I can take all this in: Thin boys balanced on each other’s shoulders, grasping and clawing and falling all over themselves—Damp, whirled towels snapping at exposed skin—Girls huddling by the shallow steps and across patio chairs, coconut oil making their earth-toned flesh glisten—An elderly woman tipping an equally elderly man toward the water beside the diving board, a look on her face suggesting long-overdue payback for some distant indiscretion; and as he falls, he reaches out and catches her arm, her desperate shriek cut short as she plunges under the surface.
The screams, the laughs, the bright chirp of conversation.
My daughter flips through the pages of Smithsonian, lingering on the glossy text of articles, the dark, elegant photographs. For a moment I feel she might glance over at me, but she does not look up. So I drift, waiting, harboring a hope for some kind of acknowledgment. When she lifts a hand, I instinctively raise mine in a responding wave, though she only scratches her neck, then casually turns another page.
Into my carefully managed life of solitude she has abruptly appeared, full-blown and nearly adult, full of what my folks had called moxie and a wealth of attitude to spare, not to mention those unpredictable hand gestures