Tiny Love: The Complete Stories of Larry Brown
Reviews
by Odie Lindsey
To rip off Larry Brown:
Larry Brown is as dead as a hammer.
He revisited this simile when he was alive.
In a novel, and in the story “Big Bad Love.”
The latter has just been reprinted.
It’s in Tiny Love: The Complete Stories, by Larry Brown.
The book would be best introduced care of excerpt.
Best to read it straight than to read some review.
Let alone a remembrance.
And yet, here we are:
I read Larry’s story “Boy and Dog” in 2003.
I was sitting on the floor of Chicago’s Harold Washington Library.
I didn’t stand up till I finished it (and the collection).
The story stacks one abrupt line after another.
It’s not a poem, but a vehicle of telling.
A boy finds his dog, Bozo, struck dead on the road.
The driver who smacked it circles back for his hubcap.
And so:
The boy had seen [the car]
He picked up a brick
The driver was going slow
He looked out the window
He really wanted that hubcap
It was a ’65 fastback
It was worth some money
…
The kid held his brick
The guy turned his head
He didn’t see the kid
The kid threw his brick
The story resolves with a fireball of burned body.
It winks at the Southern gothic wit of O’Connor.
It is cause-and-effect stripped bare.
An effect I can’t even rip off in this review.
Though I’ll parrot the premise, since I still feel its impact:
Striking me like a hammer, in 2003.
Larry grew up and died in Yalobusha County, Mississippi.
The place sculpted his subjects: local folk, local joints.
Folks alive with love and weakness—and quite often, with drink.
People who drink though they shouldn’t.
People who drink to escape, or who can’t escape drinking.
Rounders who spend windfallen money on drink.
Or the man with no money, who seeks drink anyway.
There are rascals who drive around with it.
The woman at the bar drinking, instead of driving to her boy’s baseball game.
The man who comes home drunk to glimpse his sleeping child:
A devastating reflection of his failure.
Or the man who enables his wife’s severe alcoholism:
“Lord, I love her,” he says, as he mixes her the day’s first drink.
At times, it all makes you want to drink.
And also: to never drink again.
Then there’s “Big Bad Love,” as was mentioned.
It’s about a loafer with marriage troubles, and a newly dead dog.
The dog is as “dead as a hammer,” in fact.
The man bemoans his wife’s capacious vagina.
He avoids her, in part, because of this supposed expanse.
And in part because of the dead dog at home, in the yard.
And in even more part because he seeks drink versus home.
He’s inadequate in general, a fact he can’t overcome.
Anyway, she leaves him.
Also: this cheeky buildup over a woman’s sexual misfitting makes you flinch.
The seeming cheap shot of objectification.
Even if the story is greater than, which it is, by miles.
Even if the man sports a miniscule penis.
Yes it’s good that we flinch at this stuff.
It’s even better that Brown did not.
Because staring down subjects is a beacon of his work.
As are chuckling and violence and bodily things.
Listening and music are not far behind.
(“Boy and Dog” first appeared in Facing the Music.)
Character-wise, think of ’70s Willie, or some Bruce Springsteen types.
Though Brown’s men are different.
Citing Willie: those song-men are “riding and hiding” their pain.
Larry Brown’s men can’t hide anything.
They’re cleaved open by struggle: to do right, or not.
To be moral, or not.
They may ride, but they don’t button up.
They’re not some Greatest Generation Aspiration Society:
Silent noble fucks.
Not the related, regretless, cock strokes of Bukowski.
Nope.
Larry’s men and some of his women admit things right up front:
I know better, but can’t help myself.
So we feel for them, with them, since we do what they do:
Give in, fail.
Clog the sclerotic heart with double cheeseburger.
Lie, or duck somebody.
Even though we know better.
We just know it, but do it anyway.
Try to outrun the squeeze.
At times, joy is glimpsed in the outrunning itself.
To wit, the following excerpt, from “92 Days”:
We rode for a while, drank for a while. He had some Thin Lizzy and he plugged old Philip Lynott in and the evening gloam began to turn purple and be immersed with beautiful gray-lit white clouds that rolled high up in the heavens and began to slowly unfold like gigantic marshmallows or mushrooms until the beauty of it just made me shake my head. I was alive, he was alive, the snakes were in the ditches, the deer were beginning to ease out of the woods, the beer was cold, he was free from his old lady, I was from my old lady, both of us were just free as birds. We’d both been through the woman trouble and we knew what it was. It was a heartsick and a fuckup and nobody could warn you from one to the next.
Larry’s bio is also keystone to Tiny Love, and this response.
(This has all been written about, ad nauseum.)
(Which is why the best review would be an excerpt, to let the reader weigh in.)
(Let them flinch a little bit, while not looking away.)
In case you weren’t aware:
Larry was a high school dropout.
He failed senior English.
A firefighter for years, he held many side gigs:
Cutting pulpwood, installing chain link, et cetera.
He had kids, a mortgage, no formal education.
So he decided to write literary fiction.
Oh.
He burned through bad novel after bad novel, story after story, for years.
As in, he burned some of them in a fire pit in the yard.
(That’s some lore I remember, anyway.)
Side note: in my class with Barry Hannah, he recalled ducking out on Larry.
Sneaking out the bar’s back door when Larry came in the front.
Larry: clutching another story for Barry’s feedback.
They were awful, Barry said, noting his guilt over slipping out.
Yet Barry lit up to tell of it, since he knew what developed:
Larry got better, way better.
He made it big, nationwide.
Some crowned him King of “Grit Lit”—a terrible, limiting term.
What a passé marketing shackle, an academic insect pin.
Tiny Love showcases Brown’s realm by its contours.
It’s a map, in a sense.
It charts Larry’s progression as writer.
There are straight-ahead fictions.
There are curved, alter-ego tales.
The story “Tiny Love” is a topography of Brown’s powers.
(Most of us won’t have these lit powers, ever.)
Brown’s early work even takes on postmodernity.
“Julia: A Memory” is a décollage of time and event.
Or like a Burroughs-Gysin cut-up.
“The Rich” is akin to ’80s hardcore punk: punching you.
And then there’s that “Boy and Dog.”
Its abrupt lines, in stacks.
Anyway, Brown’s writing goes with its gut.
Unsparing, it can sometimes be dated.
It makes me flinch now, to reread some of this stuff.
This fiction I am supposed to review.
A task I have ducked out on for weeks.
Other reviews have appeared, and drifted off—
e.g., the New York Times ran a raver.
Yet it only glanced at big questions.
Questions I feel compelled to try and address.
Questions hammering me dead in my tracks:
e.g., What to make of white Larry Brown writing an African American female perspective?
e.g., Should he have?
e.g., In Black vernacular dialog?
e.g., How should we react?
e.g., What about that sexist objectification?
The Times review did not tackle these vital questions head-on.
(They did run an excerpt!)
I can’t tackle them either, but have a question-as-answer: How the fuck should I know?
Besides: he wrote it.
I’ve spent years looking to my absolute idol for such guidance.
But Morrison is gone.
So I look to many others.
I had better keep on looking.
Back to Larry Brown, even?
I don’t know.
I know this: seventeen years ago I read “Boy and Dog.”
All this time later, and I still teach Larry’s work.
My students are global, rarely from the rural South.
But just before I teach the text, I reread with this litmus:
If I find something new, I will teach it again.
I teach it again.
I have read Larry’s stories on the library floor.
I have read Larry’s stories to a love who bathed by candlelight.
I have read them in a second-class train car, near Modena.
And in the wake of divorce, down in Austin.
Stories to be repeated, revisited, reconsidered, with flinching.
Stories whose reviews would best be made up of excerpts: Permission Granted by the Author.
But Larry’s dead as a hammer.
So sit down now, and read.
Odie Lindsey is the author of the forthcoming novel, Some Go Home, and the story collection, We Come to Our Senses, both from W.W. Norton. He is Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. More at oalindsey.com.
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