Perfectly Shaped Stones : BIG BAD LOVE <i> By Larry Brown (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: $17.95; 228 pp.) </i>

Larry Brown’s first book of stories, “Facing the Music,” came cross my desk some years ago with a batch of others, and just by chance I happened to pick it up, not really meaning to read it. What I was thinking was: “Just what the world needs, another short-story writer who doesn’t know a short story from an aardvark.”

But I had not read more than a page before I knew I was wrong. Dead wrong. I read the book in a single sitting, and then read it again. Here was a writer who did not know what was not possible, so he would try anything. The only difference between Larry Brown and other such writers is whatever Larry Brown tried, he made dramatic, memorable and perfectly integrated with the rest of the story.

In 25 years of writing, it was the first time I picked up the phone and tried to call the author. There was no Larry Brown listed in Oxford, Miss. I unhappily put the phone back in the cradle but--I’m pleased to say--I picked up his book of stories yet again.

Those first stories and the stories under review here all are rather like some perfect object one has come across in a wilderness. A perfectly shaped stone. Or a piece of hardwood that over the years has been weathered to a natural and unique state. To continue a simile that I probably ought to leave alone, Brown’s stories are like water that seeks its own level, or old and huge trees that have grown to their own balance.

I sought out and read his second book, a novel, “Dirty Work.” It takes place in a VA hospital between two bedridden patients, one a quadriplegic who has been in the same bed for 22 years. The quadriplegic, a black man, has managed to maintain his sanity the only way he can: He takes what he calls “trips” in his mind, imaginary journeys that are some of the funniest I’ve ever read and the most tragic.

I have not read but I have heard from fellow writers that Brown caught some bad criticism through comparisons of his “Dirty Work” with Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun.” That is nonsense and not worthy of response. I believe from the strength of Brown’s writing that he is a man who did not lose a lot of sleep over it.

But back to “Big Bad Love,” the book I’m supposed to be reviewing. There are nine stories in this book, all of them written, curiously enough, from the first-person point of view. More writers get into more trouble writing in the first person than they do from writing from any other point of view, or so I believe. Henry James did, after all, call it, “the barbarous method.”

The first-person point of view makes it easy to begin a story, easy to make everything seem incredibly immediate, and easy to establish the complication of the narrative, but unfortunately, the first-person story is almost impossible to end. Well, for most of us it is almost impossible to end. Not so for Larry Brown. Katherine Anne Porter said: “The ending ought to drop off into your hand like ripe fruit.” And so it does for Larry Brown, even using the “barbarous method.”

Every one of these stories is from the point of view of a man trying to understand the woman in his life, how to live with her, how to live without her, and there is not a single page on which there are not extremely quotable passages. Since I’m limited to so few words, I’ll give you one from a story called, “Gold Nuggets”:

“She sort of smelled bad. I was crazy and I knew it. Maybe her husband--if she had one--she probably did--was a shrimper and she shrimped with him in the daytime. Maybe she’d been down in the hot hole all day long shoveling up shrimp with a shovel. I didn’t care about any of that. She was a human being. She had the right to drink a beer. Even a drunk knows that.”

That passage is human, compassionate, and to my mind compelling. Nothing tricky about it, just good straightforward writing. I should have said it earlier and didn’t, but there are no tricks in any of these stories, no cute devices, nor are there any unexpected and convoluted endings. For all the drinking and sex--both married and not--and violence of one kind or another, these are stories of affirmation.

Earlier I said there were nine stories in this book, and so there are. There is another piece that is not a story, but I don’t quite know what to call it except to call it pure, mad, hilarious invention. It is called “Discipline,” and it takes place in a prison where all the inmates are plagiarists and the guards and disciplinarians are run by old, retired and--we can assume--bad editors. These old editors also sit on the parole board. The entire story is of a plagiarist before the parole board and having his crimes recounted to him in the process of either releasing him or making him do more time.

Some dialogue: “Who did you plagiarize the next time, Mr. Lawrence?” “. . . it was Cormack McCarthy.” “. . . now we’re talking about living writers. Now we’re getting up to a new level of theft. We’re getting up into Grant country now. Now we’re talking about the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the big time.”

The thing goes on like that, and while it is ridiculously funny, it makes its own statement about writers and writing.

It is my feeling that Brown’s voice is distinctive enough to make it impossible to confuse it with any other writer.

I send Mr. Brown my congratulations and my hope that he will be one of the most prolific writers we have. My hope that he will write a lot is entirely selfish, because whatever he writes, I will read.