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A review by thewordslinger
Big Bad Love by Larry Brown
3.0
This book has been on my shelf for a literal decade. I think I'd started it ages ago and put it down... I remembered nothing about it and I went in blind.
If you were a 20-something living in the deep south circa 1975, this book may very well be your autobiography. The writing is thick with culture and Brown does an excellent job of creating authentic sounded voices for the characters in his short stories.
Big Bad Love is a collection of short stories that display love not as some romanticized ideal, but as the real, hard, complicated emotion it is. Sometimes it involves boredom, sorrow, frustration, anger, loss, infidelity... these tales could be from anyone's past, and they feel genuine.
However, just about every single one of the stories in this collection involve the same few elements:
1. Drinking beer/alcohol
2. Thinking about women and thinking about having sex with them.
3. Smoking pot/cigarettes
4. Driving around aimlessly
After a while (I made it through part 1--about halfway through the book) I began to roll my eyes at the sameness of all the stories. It might be someone's thing out there--and I am in NO way criticizing Larry Brown's writing because it is excellent, but it's not for me.
If you were a 20-something living in the deep south circa 1975, this book may very well be your autobiography. The writing is thick with culture and Brown does an excellent job of creating authentic sounded voices for the characters in his short stories.
Big Bad Love is a collection of short stories that display love not as some romanticized ideal, but as the real, hard, complicated emotion it is. Sometimes it involves boredom, sorrow, frustration, anger, loss, infidelity... these tales could be from anyone's past, and they feel genuine.
However, just about every single one of the stories in this collection involve the same few elements:
1. Drinking beer/alcohol
2. Thinking about women and thinking about having sex with them.
3. Smoking pot/cigarettes
4. Driving around aimlessly
After a while (I made it through part 1--about halfway through the book) I began to roll my eyes at the sameness of all the stories. It might be someone's thing out there--and I am in NO way criticizing Larry Brown's writing because it is excellent, but it's not for me.