Rebel yell

The postmodern South of novelist Barry Hannah

by Julia Hanna

What does it mean to be a "Southern writer" in the first years of the 21st century? The tag's associations are as wispy and clinging as Spanish moss, as pesky as kudzu vines run rampant. Ask Barry Hannah what it means and he might get his gun for answer -- he once brandished one at unruly students in a University of Alabama classroom. Or maybe he'd tell a story that both confirms and overturns every Southern stereotype in the book.

That's what he's done in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, a long-awaited novel that is sure to delight Hannah's fans and bewilder almost everyone else. Newcomers would do better to pick up Airships (a 1985 story collection that deserves its "contemporary classic" status) before diving into this wonderfully baroque orgy of fornication, degradation, and salvation. Although Larry McMurtry called him "the best writer to come out of the South since Flannery O'Connor," Hannah's themes and characters aren't as clear-cut as O'Connor's. They exist in a shifting, postmodern landscape where the bones of Rebel soldiers serve as the foundation for an upscale fern bar and the quaint old bait shop offers "Teenage Lesbian Comedown" on tape.

One of the central forces in this whirling mass of a book is Man Mortimer, a dead ringer for Conway Twitty and "a gambler, a liaison for stolen cars and a runner of whores, including three Vicksburg housewives." Dee Allison, 36, is one such consort, a mother of four and the only woman who moves him. When Man discovers Dee's infidelity with a 60-year-old romantic named Frank Booth, he turns to his knife collection for comfort. Soon, Frank, Dee, and the residents around Eagle Lake, Mississippi, are feeling the sharp edge of Mortimer's pain. An old storekeeper, Pepper Farté, is even discovered with a football in place of his head, to the complete indifference of Sidney, his son, who happily inherits dad's business.

Familial bonds don't hold up well in Hannah's novel; instead, people find comfort and love in unions that cross the dividing lines of age, race, and species. Dee's husband is long gone; stretched between her personal and professional liaisons and nurse duty at the Onward Rest Home, she's no Betty Crocker. Yet she finds stability and security in the unlikely figure of Harold Laird, an ardent young friend of her teenage son who woos and eventually weds her. "I've used this home to grow up in," he says simply. "Now I'll take care of you." Before submitting to Harold, however, Dee lusts after Sheriff Facetto, the new lawman in town who has eyes only for Melanie Wooten, a beautiful 71-year-old widow more than twice his age. The sheriff trails impotently from crime scene to crime scene (he's a Yankee, after all), saving most of his energies for Melanie's bedroom. (If you think Hannah is one to gloss over the physical details of this Freudian coupling, consider that his 1972 novel, Geronimo Rex, describes a woman's rape by a walrus.)

It's misleading to emphasize the bizarre in Hannah's fiction at the expense of the beauty and the absolute control of his prose. His attention to language produces sentences so finely honed, they have the rhythms of poetry. Consider this description of Melanie's greyhound: "He [Ulrich] loved the face of this gentle beast, hunched as if alarmed by its own aerodynamics, its eyes sliding away, seeking affection as if its whole soul were poised on ice and betrayal lurked beneath each footfall."

It takes a lay preacher wielding a wire-wrapped club and the distracting arrival of his mother and father to bring a stop to Man Mortimer's slash-happy ways. When his aged parents track him down, " . . . they tried to force a good dream about him, but it would not come. Then they began to remember how selfish a child he had been. Yet their love loved this too. . . . It was too late not to love. . . . It was having him close, that was what life was for in the end." Love may not always conquer all, Hannah suggests, but it's still the best direction to take. When good and evil co-exist and death is a fact of life, we must find comfort whenever, wherever, and with whomever we can, never knowing how long it might last.