Big Bad Love [Hardcover]

Larry Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1990

Brown's heroes have a fatal weakness for beer, fast women, and pick-up trucks, and even when thwarted by state troopers or the women that drive them crazy, find salvation in the reckless pursuit of love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; 1st edition (September 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0945575467
• ISBN-13: 978-0945575467
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,103,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Where do you learn to write like this?, January 10, 2000

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Big Bad Love (Hardcover)

This book is such a powerful surprise that it is hard to know what to say. So many short stories one encounters in magazines and anthologies are so much 'in the tradition' that they could have been written by any number of writers. Larry Brown's stories, however, have an assured, unique and very personal style that is unlike anything else I have read. These first person confessionals by obsessed (and not too self aware) characters are gripping and funny all at the same time. There is a truth here - about language and behavior - that most authors rarely achieve.

I opened this collection of stories intending to read just one, in order to get a feel for Brown's work - which I have heard praised many times. I found myself glued to the book and finished it in one afternoon - obsessed like his characters. This is so like the high octane, drug and booze fueled narrative one gets occasionally in James Ellroy's L.A. series, but without the complex plot or life and death action. Here we see individuals - mostly down and out - struggling with their own personal demons in the red neck world of roadside taverns, pickup trucks, squalid domestic situations and many, many back roads.

Brown is able to give us the grit of Harry Crews's south without the qrotesque elements. The hard truth is here, and the humor too, but these are people that I have known. I just never cared for them as much as I do after seeing them pass through the filter of Brown's fierce vision.

Great stuff.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lordy, what a book!, April 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Big Bad Love (Paperback)

Larry Brown knows how to reach into his guts and pull out stories so true they hurt. Big Bad Love is -- and I know this term is terribly overused -- a masterpiece. Each one of his books is a small, burning miracle: Joe; Father and Son; Facing the Music; Dirty Work; On Fire.

The man knows life and he knows how to write about it.

(By the way, if you like Larry Brown, try Barry Hannah. While they are different in style, each one plumbs the depths of the human soul in a way few other contemporary authors dare.)

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Here's to the Down and Out!, March 14, 2000

By 

Thomas Ærvold Bjerre - See all my reviews

This review is from: Big Bad Love (Paperback)

As a former student of fellow Mississippian Barry Hannah, Larry Brown knows how to write. Boy, does he ever! His characters are mostly down and out "white trash" who drink a little too much beer and whiskey, ride around in their pickups in a dry, scorching Mississippi heat, with a shotgun beside them, looking for something to hunt - deer or women, either one is fine. Larry Brown has a fantastic ear for dialogue and his language posesses a brute and simple poetry. I just love the way he writes:

"My dog died. I went out there in the yard and looked at him and there he was, dead as a hammer. Boy, I hated it. I knew I'd have to look around and see about a shovel. But it didn't look like he'd been dead long and there wasn't any hurry, and I was wanting a drink somewhat, so I went out a little further into the yard to see if my truck would crank and it would, so I left. Thought I'd bury the dog later. Before Mildred got home. Figured I had plenty of time." (p. 47)

"Big Bad Love" is a powerful collection of stories about small people living lives of quiet desperation, about their struggles with women, alcohol, and themselves. A small masterpiece of understanding and understatement.