TINY LOVE

A career-spanning collection by a master of American realism.

When he decided to become a writer in 1980, Brown (A Miracle of Catfish, 2007, etc.) was a 29-year-old father, husband, and firefighter; he had never written fiction before. Fifteen years after his death, this sweeping collection charts Brown’s progress from tyro to master. It begins with “Plant Growin’ Problems,” Brown’s first publication, which appeared in Easyriders (yes, the motorcycle magazine) in 1982. The story is nothing special on its own—chronicling a marijuana-farming motorcyclist’s cartoonishly fateful run-in with a crooked sheriff—but, fascinatingly, it contains trace levels of the complicated humanism that characterizes Brown’s later work. In his debut collection, Facing the Music (1988), Brown is visibly casting around for his proper form. “Boy and Dog,” for example, is composed entirely of five-word sentences (e.g. “The dog was already dead”) and reads like an experiment. “The Rich,” meanwhile, set in a travel agency, is a language-driven social satire: “The rich often wear gold chains around their necks. Most of the rich wear diamond rings. Some of the rich wear gold bones in their noses. A lot of the rich, especially the older rich, have been surgically renovated. The rich can afford tucks and snips.” In between these experiments, however, Brown explores topics like alcoholism, infidelity, codependence, pity, shame, and emotional hypocrisy—topics that recur in his second collection, Big Bad Love (1990), and in the uncollected stories he wrote later. Some readers will be put off by Brown’s female characters, many of whom are appreciated (or not) for their sexual appeal (or perceived lack of it); others will be put off by the casual racism expressed by the otherwise positively portrayed (even idealized) World War II veteran at the center of “Old Soldiers.” Distasteful though some elements of Brown’s fiction can be, these contradictions—that certain men, desperate to be loved by women, can only notice them for their bodies; that a beloved father figure can also house within him unpardonable biases—are a collateral aspect of Brown’s chief strength as a fiction writer: He is intensely compassionate, and he extends this compassion to everyone; this includes the cruel sheriff in “Plant Growin’ Problems”; it includes the mentally disturbed genital flasher in the heartbreaking “Waiting for the Ladies”; it includes men and women—in “Kubuku Rides (This Is It),” in “Tiny Love,” in “Wild Thing”—who, in their lonely and self-destructive love for the bottle, systematically erode their connections to the only people in the world who love them.

Compassionate and gritty and lyrical—a master class.