BOOK REVIEW : The Moral Landscape of the Backwoods : JOE<i> by Larry Brown</i> Algonquin Books $19.95, 345 pages

With the heat-seared, rain-lashed, hardscrabble back lands of Mississippi as his setting, Larry Brown tells a harsh story in an oddly tender way. Sometimes, the tenderness deepens the story; sometimes, it sentimentalizes it.

“Joe” is about the encounter, picaresque at first, and gradually grimmer, between the title character, a small-town contractor, and a desperately deprived and afflicted family of squatters. It is a story of an awkward, inchoate struggle for decency and dignity in an impoverished, gothically deformed moral landscape.

We meet the Jones family straggling and stumbling along a road in the fierce, parching summer heat. It is a ragged company: a bleached-out woman, her two daughters and a teen-age boy who struggles steadily along carrying the load of household odds and ends that his lurching, cursing father refuses.

They have wandered around the countryside for years, scrounging and scavenging; now they take up residence in a derelict house they once lived in before the father, Wade, was driven out of town.

The reason is not quite spelled out, but it is clear that Wade is afflicted with a depravity so limitless and instinctive that he is a wolf among men, and most of all, to his family. We see him knocking down his half-demented wife when she begins to babble, and stealing whatever Gary, his son, manages to earn and put aside. We learn eventually that he has sold another son for adoption--hence, the mother’s dementia--and by the end, he will be charging customers to have sex with his half-witted 12-year-old daughter in the beat-up van that Gary has laboriously managed to acquire.

If this dreadful figure is a blind force of darkness, Gary is a struggling spirit of light. He is, if you like, a 15-year-old Ma Joad; he is the family’s forager and provider, holding together what he can, a child taking on the weight of a grisly universe. It is his encounter with Joe Ransom, and the bond that develops between them, that gives the book, for a while, its energy of hope.

Joe, however, is not exactly a spirit of light. He is hot-tempered, randy and rough. He is a fighter with a proclivity for trouble. He has spent time in the penitentiary and is in continual danger of going back. Yet he is a man whose instinct for survival--frustrated by his volatile temperament and his tendency to punch cops--is matched by an instinct for decency. He runs, with blunt fairness, a crew of black laborers hired by a big lumber company to clear--by poison--the scrubby woodland around the town.

When Gary and Wade turn up for a job, Joe takes a gradual liking to the boy, who works with desperate diligence. Wade, for his part, is all malignant torpor--until they are paid, when he knocks Gary down and makes away with his wages.

With initial reluctance, Joe finds himself more and more in the role of mentor and protector. He helps Gary with food, offers to let the boy stay with him--protective of his mother, Gary declines--and lets him have his old van at a nominal price. The van means hope to Gary. It means being able to find jobs when his stint with Joe ends.

It is a hopeful but precarious dike against a tide: Wade’s gothic evil, Joe’s self-igniting temperament. Coming to an innocent’s defense, Joe kills a man who could be a clone of Wade. Gary is alone again, Wade is at large. We sense that the boy will prevail. We sense also that the cost will be terrible.

This is the fourth published fiction by Larry Brown, a Mississippi fireman whose gritty stories of life in his part of the country have aroused astonished admiration. There is a lot to like and admire in “Joe.” Brown’s sense of place is superb--his feeling for the back roads, for his characters’ drawling detours and for the desperate means that festering hardship and old angers employ in this hard countryside. His writing is sinewy and lyrical. Often, in a quick turn, a lean sentence will take a sudden drop into mystery.

The three principal characters all have life and immediacy. Wade would be unbearable to read about if he did not show, at times, a purposefulness so pure as to hint at innocence as well as evil. It is no small accomplishment for Brown to demonstrate that evil can entertain, amid our revulsion, that the devil can make us laugh. Gary, as an adolescent, has fewer prominent features, but his purity is equally if oppositely convincing.

Joe is less original. His stance as a man alone, rough-hewn, impetuous and decent, is too close to a familiar fictional and film stereotype to take us very far. Brown, in his chiaroscuro, makes his darkness authentic. His light--apart from the remarkable light he gives to Gary--tends to seem borrowed.

A hard-bitten but kindly sheriff, a crippled storekeeper who reads and collects rare books and Joe’s tough but tender ex-wife are more adjectival than substantial. They soften and rather cheapen Brown’s harsh and often beautiful stories; they are inferior gilt on a swamp lily.

Next: Judith Freeman reviews “Forms of Shelter” by Angela Davis-Gardner (Ticknor & Fields).