Big Bad Love

August 29, 1990
Brown, whose novel Dirty Work was published to high praise last year, returns to short fiction in this virtuoso collection that parades a club of backwoods loners--men who swill too much beer, want too many women and write too many short stories. A casual glance suggests invasion of Raymond Carver territory, but Brown stakes out his own turf by dint of his integrity and wit; his heroes are savants of the down-and-out set, harrowingly aware of their own limitations without abandoning hope of salvation. Brown's people are disempowered but canny: at the end of ``Falling Out of Love,'' the narrator says, ``I saw with a sick feeling in my heart that our happy ending was about to take a turn for the worse.'' In ``Discipline,'' presented as a play, a writer sentenced to ``hacks' prison'' comes before the parole board; he claims that the guard--a senior editor--has punished him for his poor writing by forcing him to prostitute himself. The final story, ``92 Days,'' constitutes a type of coda: a man otherwise immolated in grief turns to fiction, embroiling his characters in situations that mirror his own desperation and abandoning them--and their stories--when he cannot construct solutions for them.

September 30, 1991
Womanizing, heavy-drinking, often desperate backwoods loners inhabit this virtuoso collection of short stories. According to PW , ``A casual glance suggests invasion of Raymond Carver territory, but Brown stakes out his own turf by dint of his integrity and wit; his heroes are savants of the down-and-out set, harrowingly aware of their own limitations without abandoning hope of salvation.''

August 1, 1990
From the author of Dirty Work, a searing war/antiwar novel ( LJ 7/89), comes a rich, moody collection of stories. All feature male protagonists of the beer-drinking, pick-up truck-driving persuasion, who are awkwardly trying to relate to women in a raunchy, sentimental way. Most seem stranded by a failure to communicate, a yearning to connect with others. "Discipline" is a different style, effectively told as a courtroom interrogation. The final long story, "92 Days," is an almost too-real chronicle of a writer trying to get published, struggling with a lack of money and a bitter ex-wife, drinking too much, but still driven by the need to write. Brown, an ex-firefighter from Oxford, Mississippi, might just become another powerhouse Southern writer.-- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.

Copyright 1990 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.