Barry Hannah (1942–2010)

French Edward is a beautiful man, a well-loved tennis player from Vicksburg, Mississippi. "It made me love America, to know he was in it." His wife, Cecilia, is especially beautiful. "She made you weak. You wanted to be her chair."

French gathers a retinue of colorful personalities, including Baby Levaster, a doctor who acts as his manager at times. Also Jim Word, who's been in love with French forever, and army captain Bobby Smith, who's in love with his own aunt.

As beautiful as he is, show more French's brain isn't quite right after he saves Word from throwing himself off a bridge. There's a lot of misguided love. French takes to writing bad poetry.

The story scatters and regroups in a different form each time, pulsing as the characters draw apart and come back together not quite the same as before. And there's Barry Hannah's elasticity of thought and language throughout, little works of art surfacing within a sentence, or populating the entire sentence or even paragraph. show less

Rick Bass’s 1933 introduction to this book of two novels couldn’t be more prescient and timely today:
“I want you to imagine, for a moment, a world without Barry Hannah: how dangerous it would be. A world in which the self-important, the brusque, the shallow, the greedy and the cowardly were not only free to roam unchecked, but a world in which these types were perhaps encouraged to prosper and multiply.”

Wow.

Boomerang appears to be a combination of short fiction pieces and memoir show more interwoven and loosely progressive. Some highlights:
“I scout under the bleachers, for what life has dropped.”
“The both of us have come back to this pretty and humane town to practice secular humanism as hard as we can. That is when we’re just staring out of windows trying to see even the rough face of God in the clouds or in the vapor over the oil spots in the parking lot of the Jitney Jungle.”
“Everybody is better off and worse than you could know in your furthest dreams.”
“I always smile at the cops around here and there are a few good ones. I even saw one in the bookstore once.”
“There is a quality of life when you listen to all of Bach and some jazz and you are out of cigarettes.”
Hannah, or his narrator, also professes to a love of animals and a tendency to treat women poorly. He, as Bass says, “snarls at the crude and savage,” as well as himself at times.

Never Die is a humorous and almost intoxicating Western filled with ugliness, violence and grotesque characters, almost like a frontier Harry Crews. show less

Boomerang is a rich blend of autobiography and fiction; confession and hope. Barry Hannah tells of friends, enemies, wives, loves, “christers” and scoundrels. He shows his great love of animals and his children, and for his wives – when they’re not hating each other.

Women provoke some of Hannah’s most biting and memorable writing. About one wife:
“My great sullen manliness is controlling her and she has no
self-esteem anymore, which is exactly the way I want it.
I am a show more terrible man.”
Another wife, his first, “had the great talent for taking the heart out of
any situation that gave me joy. She had no friends. Everything
scared her.”
And some deadly humorous observations: “It is terrible to see a woman
become religious.”

But he loves women, and the dichotomies of loving them, and life in general.
As Hannah tells is: “Nothing is ever as you have explained it. Everybody is better off and worse than you could know in your furthest dreams.” show less

Ray is a doctor, former Navy F-4 pilot, and a tortured soul. He has “a hundred-and-fifty IQ and perfect pitch on instruments,” but is a mess. Or maybe it’s part of the reason he’s a mess – being too aware and in tune with the world. He’s a drinker, philanderer, a smasher of rules. Ray’s beloved wife, Westy, comes to believe he puts himself “deliberately in peril and in trash.” His point of view switches between the Civil and Vietnam wars and present time.

There’s poetry, show more truth and music in Hannah’s prose. Humor and tragedy are always intermingled in his work. And as always, his writing is a little magical. show less