High Lonesome: Stories

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.

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.

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 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