A ‘grit lit’ tiger changes his stripes

LARRY BROWN is considered the champion practitioner of what is sometimes referred to as “grit lit,” a mostly Southern-based genre featuring rough characters, rough terrain and rough treatment. A truck always gets a flat in Brown’s fictional universe, and the big fellow approaching with the tire iron is not your friend.

But all along, there have been traces of a surprisingly sweet-natured humor in his writing too. His latest novel, “The Rabbit Factory,” finds this side of Brown in full bloom. There is mayhem, to be sure, but it does not hold the driver’s seat. His tears and groans of agony have been supplanted by a winning smile. Readers can only be grateful when they encounter a likable teenager whose best pal is a kitten-adoring male pit bull named Jada Pinkett.

The jacket compares the structure of “The Rabbit Factory” to director Robert Altman’s classic film “Nashville,” suggesting that the novel gathers characters whose lives do not seem connected. The comparison is just, as far as it goes, but Brown’s storytelling moves much faster than Altman’s. Altman leisurely appears to be displaying so many pieces of a puzzle; Brown is a dealer flinging cards down on the table with blinding speed in a high-stakes poker game. In fact, one of the novel’s chief characteristics is that it’s compulsively readable -- a literary page-turner.

Set in Memphis and northern Mississippi, the story introduces several novels’ worth of characters. First there is Eric, the aforementioned owner of the delightful Jada Pinkett. Eric’s father is one of Brown’s patented unsavories and when Eric realizes his old man harbors ill intentions toward the pit bull, he heads to the big city to save its life. He works in a pet store, shacking up in his car at night, until he is drawn into the lives of the elderly Arthur and his young wife Helen. Eric becomes a surrogate son to Arthur, while Helen’s interest is a bit more physical. Eric wants to please, but when he moves into the couple’s Memphis mansion, he discovers his good nature is at cross-purposes. Helen is forever tipsy, full of desire and just around the corner. Arthur, meanwhile, wonders if he should give in to Helen’s cravings and go to the doctor to get a pump for his privates. This is more than any young man can handle.

There is Anjalee, a prostitute who has fallen for Frankie, an underworld figure who makes the mistake of killing the wrong man during a hit and pays with his life. Then there is Merlot, a groovy, dopey literature professor at Ole Miss who takes up with Penelope, a lovely black police officer, and tries to keep her from discovering the dark secret he hides in the back of his house a la Charlotte Bronte’s Edward Rochester. Except Penelope is no Jane Eyre; she packs a pistol, and Merlot’s secret housemate is in for a surprise. Then there is Domino, the ex-con who drives a truck full of meat for a mysterious tycoon named Mr. Hamburger, who, as it turns out, assigned Frankie the hit job and disposed of him when he screwed it up. Oh, and Mr. Hamburger owns lions and a very ruminative little dog: “Since he was just a dog ... [he] didn’t know the names of things like squirrels, or man, or trees ... but he could see all those things ... so he dreamed on his shelf of chasing those things with fuzzy tails until they went up those things he sometimes raised his hind leg and peed on....”

“The Rabbit Factory” is a merry riot of characters in which everyone keeps bungling and crossing paths under Brown’s confident direction. Though he has a lot of fun with this teeming crew, his narrative stance is deeply compassionate and his perspective intimate. Appropriately, he has employed a prose style that is conversational and knowing, backlit by lightning flashes of tender poetry. Here is a novel that provides powerful entertainment but at the same time satisfies the heart and mind. It is very hard indeed to put this joyful book down.