Customer Reviews

Yonder Stands Your Orphan

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

"Yonder Stands Your Orphan", by Barry Hannah brings together dozens of characters who span the human range of strange and bizarre, and are ruled by the strangest and cruelest of all. The area he has created is one of the spots where having arrived after a wrong turn on the highway you find you are through the looking glass. In this instance, a long way through the looking glass.

This book purports to be a, "searing picture of The American South". I hope that part of the introduction is as unlikely as this many dysfunctional players gathering in one place. I cannot imagine anyone living in the area of The American South he portrays being pleased with his version. The book may be intended more as dark humor than any sort of realistic portrayal, however if that is the case, it is well hidden.

This is a place where most have some unsavory past, and often share it with more than one other of the players in the book. Where skeletal remains are not a cause for an investigation, but rather as friends to sit in the moonlight with. The author has also created one of the great predators of fiction in Mortimer. If there was ever a person with absolutely no redeeming value as a life form, it is this character.

There is much that will have to be left for your reading of the book, as the action goes light-years beyond illicit liquor, and petty crimes. Barry Hannah has created a very dark locale and filled in with the darkest of human impulses, actions, and abuses. The book is not a gratuitous ride through low level humanity; in fact the players in the book are generally so abject in their behavior that they cease to cause even mild alarm as the book progresses. The book is rather beguiling even though you may be hoping for the graphic end to many you will read about. This is most definitely a book unlike one you have read before, so if a new view on the lower levels of human behavior sounds interesting, read away.

As a solid Hannah fan, I looked forward to this latest with great anticipation and wasn't at all disappointed. To the contrary, I think he's reached a new pinnacle. All of the editorial reviewers comments here are a propos, with the possible exception of the remark that the "plot fails to hold [the characters] into a cohesive story." That reviewer may not have understood that a "plot" isn't needed in this intentionally meandering crazy quilt of a story whose intricate interweavings themselves form the glue of the piece; the linear structure (such as it is) is quite secondary. The trip's the thing, not the destination. Hannah combines his well-known ear for language with a gift for trenchant observation. A reviewer once remarked that every sentence Hannah writes is a surprise, and with this novel the remark is no hyperbole. Every phrase moves along the action, or defines relationships, or conveys insight and/or laugh-out-loud humor. He compresses whole philosophies into throw-away lines. His verbal richness and economy makes for slower reading than with most books (not a problem for me since I like to chew things over anyway), but it's well worth it. Hannah doesn't waste your attention with pap, or filler, or lead-in sentences. It's all meat.

And a caution: reviewers who compare Hannah to McMurtry or Faulkner or other Southerners, if not being downright patronizing, do him a disservice. He's quite aware of literature beyond the confines of the South, thank you. The violence in this novel, while sinister and redolent of that in the larger culture, wants to be read like the over-the-top, Post-modern Pulp Fiction variety. Hannah is a fascinatingly original prose stylist whose world is as unique as Nicholson Baker's or Peter Handke's (two other favorites). Hannah's subjects may be rural and Mississippian, but he's a cutting-edge writer, make no mistake, and one of the very best alive, in my view.

For those still reluctant to part with the purchase price, check the riotous--but typical--excerpt in July's Harper's.

If Barry Hannah were James Joyce, 'Yonder Stands Your Orphan' would be his 'Ulysses.' By that I mean this isn't the place to start reading him, but if you've been blooded by his short stories or earlier novels and liked them - well then "Yonder" is your basic "towering work of staggering genius." I intend no irony, nor do I contend the book is perfect...just startlingly original.

At its core "Yonder" contemplates good and evil. Early on in the novel, a married couple crucify themselves, only later to resurrect their vows and return to the same house and raise orphans...negligently. The main antagonist, an entrepreneurial pimp named "Man Mortimer" is either evil, or going insane, depending upon your politics. At any rate, he's a menace to a lakeside society (somewhere up the Yazoo) that's too preoccupied with fishing and SUV's to perceive the threat. As he hacks away at the populace "Man" (who takes a stiletto to the testicles fighting over his lover) grows ever smaller and more childish. The cosmetic surgery his victims require makes them resemble their attacker -- a dead ringer for Conway Twitty. A few preachers and an ex-doctor, (become a jazz musician,) notice something is amiss, but their deeds and commitments are too ingrained to stop "Man" from going bad to worse. A much despised and yearning sheriff would rather do drama than police work. About halfway through the book the plot took off for me. Then I couldn't stop reading because I wanted to know what would stop this Man.

On the way to the end "Yonder" made me laugh aloud. Hannah is juvenile enough to name a character Sidney Farte, (his character is summarized in a single phrase the he shouts at a wedding, but it's too perverse, funny and sad to quote on Amazon) but deft enough to make me feel -- and understand -- his life of disappointment and rage. In that it reminded me a bit of Harry Crews.

It IS true, however, that you need a scorecard to keep track of the characters. On top of that Hannah isn't always blatant about signaling point of view changes and can't be bothered explaining every topical reference. (He seems to be a voracious consumer of high and low culture.) Reading between the lines is obligatory here and even so the most indulgent reader will occasionally have to sacrifice a sentence to the gods of Hannah-world. Like Pynchon, he doesn't meet you half way - but to a very different end. "Yonder" isn't a literary puzzle, but it makes sense that Hannah's novels are less appreciated than his shorter fiction. Brevity mitigates the reader's risk in a short story. Less is asked of us before reaching the payoff.

Reading a novel so laden with sub-subtext IS challenging too. Hannah's point of view is more intimate than 'in their shoes,' 'on their shoulder,' or even 'through their eyes.' He seems to spin tales from inside the characters' cerebral cortex, scrotum...or occasionally the left ventricle of their ailing heart. That can be disorienting - almost any reader will occasionally have to back up and to get their bearings again - but you're motivated to figure things out because their warped loquacity is what makes his idiosyncratic characters genuinely compelling. In other words "Yonder" is no-holds-barred literary fiction. If you find the style disconcerting, read his earlier work or just keep going and you'll find the beat. When you do let yourself be immersed the prose grows addictive, occasionally inducing transcendence.

Some readers see `Yonder' as a condemnation of the South. Twaddle. It laments all of "Big Mart" America, not any specific geography or demographic. The character closest to Hannah's point of view (in that Raymond plays sax with the same be-bop syntax and sensibility as his creator) declares:

"A zombie had just waited on him in the pawnshop, a man who stood there remarking on the history of his saxophone. In apparently good health, in decent clothes and well groomed, polite, but quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond. You look at them and know they are spaces into otherness. Not adolescent either, that natural Teutonic drifting or the sullenness without content. They might still be people, but unlikely.

Everything about the zombie is ravaged except his obsession, thought Raymond, following the red car. Dead to every other touch. They simply imitate when there is movement or sound. They imitate the conversations around them to seem human to one another. He had seen them in scores from the airports to the bandstand imitating one another, mimicking the next mimicker in no time, no space, no place, no history.

The bad restaurant even had bad-food loungers and loiterers, hard to shake when they got a good imitation of you going. The restaurant with its RESTAURANT sign. Its mimicking of the dining life, yet no edible food, bad water and a weak tea to go with that. `Refill that beige for you, sir?' Every dish served in contempt for what used to be human. Rations for an unannounced war."

That's as blatant as Hannah gets - he even italicized some of the original to let you see he's on a soapbox - but reviewers persist in reading his work as a collection of `colorful' southern eccentrics lacking a larger context. The idea that this is just a collection of "Barry's brilliant sentences" sells the work short, not to mention its author. Despite the orphans, this is a book written about an aging community, for adults, by a man who was confronting potentially terminal cancer. The book's title is a lyric from Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," but this novel has the `nothing to lose' tone of Dylan's later work: "Time out of Mind." Both are work by men who have honed their craft for decades, ruminated and reached some conclusions. And like Dylan, Hannah has made his peace without giving an inch. This book is the result and it's a wonder!

I'm a fan of Barry Hannah; ever since I read "Airships" I've been hooked. ("Testimony of Pilot," from that collection, is simply the best short story I've ever read.)

In my opinion, this novel isn't his best work--I think the characterizations, though admiringly strange, aren't as coherent as I expected--but this book is still worth reading, if you enjoy a challenge.

While someone like Don DeLillo has gotten more and more remote, "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" brings us in. We may not like the world it creates, but it's its own world, nonetheless.

Yonder Stands Your Orphan takes the reader to the Mississippi community of Eagle Lake, known in the Vicksburg area for good crappie and bass fishing, home of Man Mortimer, a nasty Conway Twitty look-alike, a pimp with a collection of knives. We meet Egan, an ex-biker preacher with a dark past, a pony tail and a tattoo of a Malteze cross on his cheek. We meet Max Raymond, ex doctor and sax player, his wife, a Cuban singer known as The Coyote. Wild children roam the woods around the lake, toting around two human skeletons, assembled with wire. We visit an armed orphan camp on the lake operated by a deluded lunatic couple. There is much more.

Not mentioned anywhere in the text, the title of Hannah's novel quotes Bob Dylan, Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, from a song called It's All Over Now Baby Blue. In Eagle Lake, the American Dream is all over, finished. Man Mortimer runs a prostitution ring operating out of the back of a fleet of Sports Utility Vehicles. He is a murderer and a pimp but he bears the likeness of country singer Twitty. One of his victims, cut repeatedly across the face, emerges from surgery with a new face, also Twitty's but this time the face of the singer in his younger days. Don't be fooled by appearances. Is Hannah writing about the South, or about America, or is he writing about humanity? Egan preaches, “People used to have work, with their hands. But behold the zombie of the empty, the Middleman, the parasite and usurer”.

Dysfunctional America is not a new subject in American literature. Consider Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. However, Hannah is a powerful writer. As bleak and strange a picture as he paints in Yonder, this reader had no problem suspending disbelief, not for a second. Yonder Stands Your Orphan is Mr. Hannah’s first novel in a decade, and with it he is riding squarely at the top of his game. .

I generally read for fun. This indeed was fun but don't sit down to read lightly. Much of this is like reading poetry and I found myself reading many passages outloud to get the full emotion and feeling of the characters. Mr. Hannah is a writer in a different category to most, for in my opinion, he is truly an artist.

I agree that some of the writing/sentences are brillant, I didn't find the story cohesive. I read all the reviews and couldn't wait to sink my teeth into this book and half way through I felt I must be really dim not to be enjoying this book. By the end I decided perhaps many of the reviewers were afraid to admit this book was simply bizarre. The story was in solid 2nd place to the 'style'. I never forgot I was reading a work of fiction, few things rang true to me. I have a wide varity of likes in reading, but I would never be able to include this book.

"She sat up and paid attention now and then to her boys, as she had seen Mrs. Cleaver and others do on ancient television shows." A Barry Hannah sentence is unlike anyone else's . A Barry Hannah sentence is one that often leaves you breathless. A Barry Hannah sentence is worth thousands of paragraphs by other writers. Yonder Stands Your Orphan is a lovely, and magical novel. It is a book filled with Barry Hannah sentences!

Gotta hand it to him--this book is by far his best novel yet, and that's SAYING something.

So this is his best book? Yeah, sure, he writes great sentences, but the narrative weaves, stumbles, and circles so that you are left with pages of mindless, incoherent, blather. Why couldn't he write paragraphs, pages, and chapters like he does the occasional sentence. Like a sports team loaded with showboating stars who don't play as a team and therefore can't win.