Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Just had come off of reading Fathers and Sons by Larry Brown and was ready to sink into another book about the South. This book was disappointing to the degree that I gave up after 15 pages. Guess even though I've been an avid reader for at least 6 decades I'm not sophisticated enough to make sense out of the tangled mess of this book. I've read all I can get ahold of by Larry Brown and Kent Haruf and was looking for a new source of that type of writing. This sure wasn't it.

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.

"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.

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.