Customer Reviews

High Lonesome

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This is a collection of short stories by one of the best writers in America today, which is why I'm amazed nobody seems to know about him. He's either a well-kept secret, or is perhaps symptomatic of the incestuous nature of the publishing world. I just can't figure why he's not better-known than he is, because he's so good.

Regardless, learn from this man if you desire to write decent stuff. I go through his books with a highlighter, marking good lines, of which there are plenty. Here's one from "Get Some Young":

"Walthall bought an ancient Jaguar sedan for nothing, and when it ran, smelling like Britain on the skids or the glove of a soiled duke..."

Like all good southern writers, Hannah uncovers the contradictions and depravities of the South with beautiful language. The previously-mentioned story is full of odd characters, while "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis" is a laid-back story of youthful misadventure; "Carriba" is a bizarre tale of disgrace and redemption (?) with some great language; "Snerd and Niggero" deals with adultery, southern-style, and so on. Twisted southern living portrayed with magical prose.

Hannah is a joy to read (although not an easy read at times), and his works sparkle with lyrical gems that shine for you even if you don't know a bijou from a beignet.

I picked up High Lonesome at the public library and brought it home with me a day or two ago. Read some stories last night, a few this morning when I woke up. There's good, good writing in this little book. It's not always easy writing, but it lets you in on not a few truths, some big, some small. Made me go down to the corner store and buy a six-pack of PBR tallboys and drink one in the hot hot sun, it still an hour before noon, just to think about the lives and the heartache and every now and again crazy joy I'd just been privilaged to glimpse.

Yes, yes.

High Lonesome by Barry Hannah. The Atlantic Monthly Press, 230pp.

At the close of "Repulsed," one of the thirteen short stories from Barry Hannah's fine new collection, the narrator discloses that in his "line of work you find at least one monster in every block. A sorry rule," he continues, "but one without which I wouldn't be necessary at all. There isn't hardly any kind of human ugliness can live by itself forever. It can't keep, it's got to leap out on parade. Then they call me."
Of course, this itinerant trumpeter and his muse--the vision of a floating, toasted French loaf mysteriously suspended en route to his elderly neighbor's mouth--is not the only character on call in the superbly crafted pages of Hannah's fiction: High Lonesome continues the wondrous parade of ugliness and neuroses we have come to expect from the author of Bats Out of Hell and Ray.

Hannah has commented that "it is up to the author to be a scientist of the word," and his most recent collection proceeds to fashion an astounding language that gives a grotesquely eloquent voice to even the most pathetic of voyeurs. Consider the meticulously deviant narrator of "Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night" who begs for "minor disasters," and whose idea of a good date is to cruise the highway in search of the perfect wreck. This closet capitalist eventually sees himself in his wife's impassioned consumerism when he returns home to find that his raccoon-friendly muscadine arbor has been usurped by an elaborate metal imitation. "But my raccoon, my arbor, my self!" he screams, while we try to decide whether we are laughing at or with him.

Perhaps the centerpiece of the collection is "Carriba," a story about another adept watcher--a reformed ex journalist ("I was a hag and a parasite") with a talent for matchmaking contrite manslaughterers--who offers his own house as a haven for a family embroiled in the murder scandal he has been asked to cover. As in so many of Hannah's stories, a life of self-contained voyeurism and obsession is never enough in itself: it must get involved, break out from behind the window, announce itself; as another of High Lonesome's narrators comments, "The willingness to go public with hideous disease as if that were the primary goal in life. Why else am I writing?"

Indeed, in "Ned Maxy, He Watching You" Hannah forces the most stubborn of voyeurs to step out into a world that reciprocates by speaking "back to him. Not loudly and not a lot, but some." Readers may be surprised by the inclusion of "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis" and "The Ice Storm," two essays that were published in Sports Afield and Outside, but Hannah's fiction has always been an arena in which a keen sense for the factual, the historical, does battle with a relentless and foolhardy imagination. After all, in High Lonesome, as T. Bandini--tragic football fanatic who worships "the violent crush"--appreciates, "Nobody is really...anything. Everybody is just a collision."

James D. Lilley
The University of Arizona

One of many Mississippi writers to achieve high respect (at least by critics and peers) is Barry Hannah, author of eleven titles. His latest, High Lonesome, finds him reasserting himself as a master of the short story. The thirteen tragic and oddly funny tales range from "Get Some Young", in which an old shopkeeper and his wife become more than friends with an "almost too good-looking" boy, to "The Agony of T. Bandini", where the main trouble-maker is possibly a closeted homosexual and insists that "Everybody is just a collision." Hannah's style is as flashy as ever if not less brutal as his past work. His subject matter circles around eccentric oldsters, drunks, wannabe musicians, war vets, and wimpy geeks. At times it's like a southern Tom Robbins, which can sometimes not work, but mostly does. Barry Hannah does it again. And again. And again...

High Lonesome takes the cake, for me, as Barry Hannah's most invigorating publication (although I have not yet read three or four of his others). What would normally be an incoherent collection of short stories. Some are so brief they might seem like afterthoughts if read for the first time, perhaps, on the floor of the bookstore fiction section. However, after reading the entire collection it is clear the special place each story holds, big or small.

The book is a true southern shotgun shack. The longer stories are the rooms, the short stories are pictures on the wall. I can always go back to it for more.

Hannah's got a pretty stellar reputation, and yet, whenever I've browsed his books in the library or bookstore, they never quite grabbed me. However, lately, I've been getting a lot more satisfaction from short story collections than novels, especially when it comes to American authors. So when a friend lent me this collection of 13 Mississippi-set stories from Hannah, I dived right in instead of waiting my usual 6-12 months to start it. Once I pick a book up, it's 95% likely I'll finish it -- unfortunately this one fell into the 5%... I read five of the stories and started two others before finally putting it aside to return to my friends.

For whatever reason, my browsing instinct was dead-on -- I'm simply not in synch with Hannah's style at all. He's certainly got a certain distinctive mood all his own, kind of a grotesque minimalist Southern thing, but it never really hung together or engaged me. There are some great lines here and there, but the hunt just wasn't worth the effort. The characters tend to be the kind of eccentrics one often finds in such collections, but the stories they inhabit simply never got off the ground for me. Some of the characters traverse stories, and when this happens, there's a bit more texture, a bit more depth, but not much. Stories like "Snerd and Niggero", which reviewers all seem to love, just fell flat for me. Two men, a woman, some bawdy prose, she dies, they cope together. Blah. "The Ice Storm" left my consciousness the second I finished it. The one story I did like was "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis", which is a nice little epic about a boy's fishing adventure. My guess is that it's purely a matter of stylistic preferences, and that like a bad blind date, Hannah and I just weren't meant to click.

My book club selected genres for this year. When Barry Hannah died our local newspaper ran an obituary in the editorial section with glowing priase of his writing ability and the fact that he was a Southern writer and teacher on the college level. I cut out the article and saved it to recommend his book for our short story genre.
I am sorry he is dead and I can't write to him. He is not a story teller. He can't use punctuation. His sentences don't make sense. His stories don't have a point. I really want my money back. I can't believe he was allowed to teach anything.
Reading reviews of his books lead one to believe he can write and his works are fit to read. They are juvenile, vulgar, sickening trash. The stories border on porn, but aren't that good.

I found Hannah's stories uninteresting and very difficult to follow. His writing , moreover , seemed disjointed and strained. I had trouble finishing this rather short book--which is very unusual for me. I initially thought perhaps it is just me, but having read the reviews of Hannah's subsequent, Yonder Stands Your Orphan I see that other readers apparently share my view of Hannah's writing. Skip this one and read Larry Brown's outstanding Facing the Music instead.