Lucky Town
In his fourth novel, Brown ( Hot Wire ) tells the intriguing story of Bobby Barlow, a teenaged boy growing up in the early '70s with a father who is more son than parent. Floyd Barlow is a laborer, gambler and occasional con man who drifts from one apartment complex to another from Seattle to Vegas in search of women or cash, with Bobby desperately trailing behind. Melinda, a former working girl turned law student and policeman's wife, motivates many of Floyd's moves, and eventually joins the pair. Bobby, functioning as the "adult" of this dysfunctional family, narrates the story from the perspective of his aged self, but his voice, like his life, is thin and hollow. He has a mouthful and headful of quasi-adult thoughts, but no real handle on what they mean; whatever bonds keep the ungainly trio together remain baffling. As Bobby puts it, they all have "nothing better to do but walk around and kill time." Brown's moribund prose and empty pretension ("I thought of the word power . . . I thought of dark clouds. Lightning. The works.") match the characters' deadened inner lives. In spite of the affectless prose, however, the novel has a dark and ruminative force.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.