The Ossining Public Library

Larry Brown's A Miracle of Catfish is subtitled A Novel in Progress. Which it is, and will be forever.

Brown was a few chapters from finishing his sixth novel in 2004 when he died after a heart attack. He was only 53, but he had lived at least two lives: For 16 years he was a firefighter in Oxford, Miss. After years of collecting rejection letters and struggling to teach himself how to write, he become an acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and essayist.

A Miracle of Catfish is vintage Brown. It's driven by terse sentences, haunting images and a sense of place you can almost smell and taste. It's filled with memorable characters, mostly poor and rural, who create a lot of trouble for themselves and the people around them. The men are the worst.

It follows a year in the lives of five major characters anchored by an aging cuss of a farmer. He's built himself a catfish pond and remains haunted by a 40-year-old crime from when Mississippi was another world.

One of his neighbors is a factory hand who goes through life messing things up. He's known only as Jimmy's daddy. Jimmy himself is a 9-year-old heartbreaker with rotten teeth and a good but confused heart. He's tragically neglected by his father who tells himself, "He'd had to temporarily abandon his drinking-less-beer idea for a while because there was too much going on. Too much he had to deal with."

Another neighbor, a black ex-con, has to deal with his daughter's good-for-nothing boyfriend. He does so violently. And the farmer's daughter, who models large ladies' lingerie, has escaped to Atlanta, but she has to deal with her boyfriend, an artist with Tourette's syndrome. He's dismissed as "the retard" by her father.

The subplots unfold as small streams headed for a bigger river, but Brown never got there before he died. The ending is left unresolved. That's both a disappointment and an invitation to readers to imagine their own endings. The last page consists of Brown's spare notes for the final chapters he never got to write.

His longtime editor, Shannon Ravenel, notes that Brown was "likely to write more than he needed. Having honed his skills on the short-story form, he reveled in the wide spaces that novels offer." After his death, she cut about 30,000 words. The editing is marked with (…), which is less distracting than it sounds. Brown's original, uncut manuscript is available at the University of Mississippi.

Despite the editing, the novel piles on the details. Brown loved to go step by step through the least dramatic of actions: messing with an engine or tending to a sick cow.

He's best appreciated by patient readers, the way a summer afternoon at a backwoods pond stocked with catfish is best enjoyed. Sooner or later, the fish will bite like his sentences do: "She was a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. She was a lot more trouble now than what she used to be, before she'd had the stroke."

Brown was a writer who was never writerly. He was never self-consciously literary, yet created a literature that will last.