Southern Pine

By John Skow

JOE by Larry Brown

Algonquin; 345 pages; $19.95

Half a cup of instant coffee. Then a cigarette. Then, let's see, yeah, here's half a can of Coke left on the table, room temperature, no more fizz. Slug of Coke, swallow of whiskey, same again. Breakfast.

Joe Ransom, at 40-some, is getting too old for this. He bosses a gang that poisons tracts of scrub forest with herbicide, so that the land can be planted with fast-growing pine. That's days. Nights, he drinks, bar fights, gambles, cats around, aggravates the local cops. In between he cruises the Mississippi back roads in an old pickup, drinking beer from a big cooler.

He's a good man, generous, hog-on-ice independent, cheerful in a wry sort of way, more than halfway decent. But his life is coming apart. His wife has left him, of course, though his dog, a surly pit-bull cross called "dog," small d, has stayed. He has done some penitentiary time, for cop fighting, and won't be too surprised to find himself jugged again. His pickup truck needs a new transmission. So does he.

Brown, a onetime Mississippi fireman who reinvented himself a few years ago as a talented fiction writer in the whiskeyish, rascally Southern tradition of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, earned high praise for a couple of books of short stories, Facing the Music and Big Bad Love, and a novel, Dirty Work. The new novel is clear, simple and powerful, and it is great, rowdy fun to read. Brown balances his fond but unsentimental portrait of Joe Ransom with stinging | sketches of a weed-tough young white-trash boy named Gary, who tags after Joe, and of Gary's evil father, a human scorpion named Wade. If anyone doubted it, Flem Snopes lives.