Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0802135692, Paperback)
Geronimo Rex, Barry Hannah's brilliant first novel, which was nominated for the National Book Award, is full of the rare verve and flawless turns of phrase that have defined his status as an American master. Roiling with love and torment, lunacy and desire, hilarity and tenderness, Geronimo Rex is the bildungsroman of an unlikely hero. Reared in gloomy Dream of Pines, Louisiana, whose pines have long since yielded to paper mills, Harry Monroe is ready to take on the world. Inspired by the great Geronimo's heroic rampage through the Old West, Harry puts on knee boots and a scarf and voyages out into the swamp of adolescence in the South of the 1950s and '60s. Along the way he is attacked by an unruly peacock; discovers women, rock 'n' roll, and jazz; and stalks a pervert white supremacist who fancies himself the next Henry Miller.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 22 Feb 2013 07:35:55 -0500)
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He attends college in Mississippi, “a rectangle of poor woe” in a school where “a number of people seemed to have come….so as to use the college as a sort of proving ground for their afflictions, wanting to know how far they could push into the world before it spat them out.”
Even in this early novel Hannah was using language to devastating effect, which makes him one of the most quotable authors around, to me. A high school marching band is so sublime “they made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere” and “was like a river tearing down a dam when they played.” He describes “the patient boiling holocaust of the drums” as they approach a parade and are about to play.
Geronimo Rex is a young man’s book and doesn’t have the entire repertoire of Hannah’s later works, but is an astonishingly good book on its own. (