Rick Bragg says he'd written a billion words in his life, but only a few of them about his father: "He had been worth three chapters to me, all he would ever be worth."

That changed when he got a son of his own.

		"THE PRINCE OF FROGTOWN" By Rick Bragg Knopf ($24)

In this latest installment of his memoirs, Bragg tacks between the story of his father and the tale of his own domestication at the hands of wife and stepson.

As he has described in his previous two autobiographical works, "All Over But the Shoutin' " and "Ava's Man," he grew up poor in a tough Alabama mill town.

His father was an alcoholic, a small, powerful man cruel in his presence and extended absences. His mother's love, his writing talent and his fearlessness got Bragg out.

"The Prince of Frogtown" explores his parents' relationship more deeply, as well as chronicling the love that unfolds in him for a child he initially views as spoiled, unappealing and not very boy-like.

The two story threads alternate clumsily, never really intertwining or resonating with one another. Bragg's style for his own story is simple and distanced:

He refers to his wife and stepson -- acquired late in life -- as "the woman" and "the boy" throughout. The chapters on them are a series of fable-like encounters.

In contrast, the chapters on his father and mother are crammed with names, nicknames and lavish detail on the wrenching, often violent progression of their lives in Frogtown, as the mill workers section of Jacksonville, Ala., was called.

He evokes his parents down to the tiniest detail, the most telling moments. His father "toted a thick, yellow-handled knife in his left hip pocket, so he could get at it, quick."

His mother "held tight to the solid silver dollar, till her baby got sick, and she swapped it to the pharmacist for a bottle of cough medicine."

Bragg's wife is barely drawn at all, and serves mainly as a disapproving feminine foil to his efforts to engage her boy, usually by instructing him in male rituals such as spoiling his appetite or shooting a gun. Bragg tells the boy it's "fine to gouge" in a fight.

"Then his mother walked up, and I was in trouble again. She would raise a gentle boy if she had to lock me in a shed."

He is also eager to remind readers of the minor humiliations of his own transformation from world-traveling, risk-taking, hard-living man's man (who is also an author and professor) to a guy who drives in a carpool and has to adjust to a son who carries a "blanky."

His writing is honest but surprisingly unreflective. Bragg escaped the life he was born to with brains and writing, but sees his upbringing as his badge of authenticity that sets him apart from people with nothing but brains and talent.

Bragg wants to dose his son with some of the grit to make him part of the same club. He comes around to loving the boy when he acts more like the writer, as when he keeps playing after getting his teeth broken in a basketball game. Bragg accepts the blanky, but glories in the busted teeth.

Where he goes deeper is in getting past the nastiness of his father and the terrible hurt he caused.

"In this last book, I do not rewrite my father, or whitewash him. But over a lifetime I have known a lot of men in prisons, men who will spend their eternity paying for their worst minute on earth. ... You do not have to forgive such men, ever, that minute. You can lock them away for it, put them to death for it, and spend your eternity cursing their name. It is not all they are."