Word: hannah
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FICTION: Airships, Barry Hannah...
...Hannah's forte is spinning tall tales around short people. His characters seem to have been stunted and stunned by life; they are accidents wandering around, trying to find out why they happened. Fate denies them selfdiscovery, sometimes in ludicrous ways. A Mississippi-born tennis pro falls into a river and comes close enough to drowning to survive only as a vegetable. The Oedipal tangle that led to his accident will never be his to grasp...
...fact that Hannah's characters and settings are chiefly Southern lends the book a flowery tang. "Beauty is fleeting," says a woman in one story. "What stays is your basic endurance of pettiness and ennui." Though Hannah readily exploits the southerner's license to orate, he is not especially interested in regional manners. His real concern is with the hollering, clawing passions that manners are supposed to civilize. Hannah likes to rend the social fabric and examine what's underneath. Two of his stories are apocalyptic, set during worldwide calamities that turn people savage. Three others take...
This lineup sounds grim, and some of it is. Hannah's penchant for using violence to get himself out of stories does not always work. The narrator of Coming Close to Donna bashes a woman's head with a tombstone. How come? Because he gives her what she wants. The end. Random calamities may be the order of the day in real life, but that is precisely why truth is stranger than fiction. Art demands more. Hannah provides it often enough. He does not revel in the macabre: he uses it to create sudden emptiness, black holes that...
Robert Frost. Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling. Saul Bellow, Sylvia Plath...