Larry Brown; Big Bad Love
Jacob Crews
Part 1
Falling out of Love C
The Apprentice C+
Wild Thing C+
Big Bad Love B-
Gold Nuggets B-
Waiting for the Ladies A
Old Soldiers A
Sleep D
Part 2
Discipline B+
Part 3
92 Days C+
Larry Brown: Big
Bad Love
I can honestly say
that I am not sure I “liked” a single story in this book. They are too real for
that. Too honest. Not superficial enough to leave someone feeling only one
emotion. Instead, I adore some of them. I abhor some of them. Most of them are
somewhere in between. They are all about male main characters who are enrolled
in the school of hard knocks, most of them at their own expense and yet by
their own decision. Larry Brown is called the writer of “The Dirty South” and
his portrayal of the South definitely lives up to expectations. The book is
full of sex, drunk driving (literally so much drunk driving), marital
infidelity, and so much talk of male genitalia that it becomes expected and
okay by the third story. But it is so real. It is almost too real. Reading
these stories made me sad. They made me laugh. They are depressing, but so true
that it is humorous. Larry Brown has mastered sentiment. I have never seen or
in this case read anything like it. When you read Big Bad Love you very quickly realize that you are no more than a
catfish on the end of Brown’s trot line, and he can do whatever he wants with
you now.
Waiting for the
Ladies
The story begins with
a man who is irate. His wife just returned from taking the trash and there was
a man there who flashed her. His penis was very small, and that is obviously
essential to the story because it is something that almost every character discusses.
Our main character grabs his shotgun, pushes a few shells of 00 buckshot into
it and hops in his truck in search of the flasher or the blue Ford pickup his
wife saw him in. Of course, the flasher is nowhere to be found when our main
character arrives at the garbage place and the main character is left to travel
home, and stew in his thoughts and anger there. Every day, the character drives
through town and passes the garbage place in hopes of seeing the flasher. He obsesses
over the need to see this flasher himself. What makes this story easily one of
the best that I have read, is the mental wrestling that the character does, and
how Brown lets the reader be part of it. We follow every thought the main
character has. From an insatiable blood lust, to wondering if he should feel
bad for the guy, because he obviously has a micro-penis and cannot get laid.
There are points where you sympathize with the flasher and points where you
consider going and getting the shotgun from your own closet to join in on the
hunt. The real art of the story is the car that keeps driving by. We have no
clue who it is. What we do know is that the main character’s wife is extremely successful
at work. Getting promotions almost monthly and working overtime without
accepting pay. It is why our main character was able to retire early and live
comfortably. Throughout the story, the car drives by and slows down, then
speeds away. It isn’t the flashers blue truck, but is instead a nice, luxury
sedan. One day, the main character finally sees the blue truck and begins a hot
pursuit. By this point, he has talked to local attorneys and the police and Sherriff’s
departments. He knows the name and the address of the flasher, but wants to put
the fear of God… or man… into him and chases him home. He followers the flasher all the way to his home.
He pumps a shell into the gun, busts into the door, and does the unexpected.
The small penis talk and absurd amounts of drunk driving make this story scary.
The ending of the story makes it masterful.
Old Soldiers
This story is
exactly how it sounds. A story of war heroes who come home and become heroes of
life. It is well written. It is hilarious and extremely bittersweet, bordering
on sentimentality. For me though, it never fell into that category because of
my great grandfather Ralph Carter. He is in this story under the name Mr. Aaron.
Mr. Aaron is a veteran of the Korea conflict and is a man of very few words and
even fewer emotions. He runs a store/gas station on a country backroad and
refuses to serve anyone who is not white. He only drinks Milwaukee beer and
hard liquor. He seems like a hard, pitiless man. That is, until he gets around
other old soldiers. Then, he becomes a beacon of hope. He will never let one of
them down, and we see that throughout the story. He is not a man’s man, he is a
soldier’s solider.
Discipline
This story is
trippy to say the least. It is written like a play, without any character names
and with fewer than 5 stage directions (which is not much considering it is
almost 35 pages long). At no point in the story does the plot make a lick of
sense. It seems that there is a man on trial for being a bad writer and he has
been in writer rehabilitation. At some point during said rehabilitation he
claims to have been forced to have sex with an obese white woman. There is an
interrogator in the court room who is trying to prove that he deserved the
punishment because he is a plagiarizer and has committed the worst plagiarism
of them all. The thing that I instantly thought of when I began to read this
story is Faulkner. The lack of punctuation, the misuse of commas, the lack of
commas, the lack of quotes, it is like a sexualized page out of “As I Lay Dying”.
The story is insanely experimental and follows no rules at all. In fact, we
learn that the crime that the man on trial committed was copying Faulkner’s
style to write about a fart.
I love this story.
I do not want to. I wanted to hate it so bad because it is as weird as a story
can get but Brown’s use of dialogue is flawless. An honest testament to the
power of dialogue and the writing prowess of Larry Brown.
Where to buy:
Pretty much any bookstore, or if you are lazy and prefer them shipped to your door, here
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