Barry Hannah's fiction blows away all the other mid-century American post-modernists. He makes John Barth's narrative trickery look like utter masturbatory nonsense. He makes Robert Coover's plays at authenticity seem like a little city boy playing a country part. (Basically, he makes them look like the hipsters they were, and still are for the most part.)
Hannah died about a year ago, but his fiction has yet to receive its due revival. Always under-appreciated during his lifetime, Hannah's work deserves another, closer look.
Richard Ford told the AP, “Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and make those forms up newly for himself.”
Here's an excerpt from Hannah's story "Water Liars".
My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow. The movement of every limb in every passionate event occupies my mind. I have a prurience on the grand scale. It makes no sense that I should be angry about happenings before she and I ever saw each other. Yet I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t.
You could not believe how handsome and delicate my wife is naked.
I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago.
Related Links:
1. Oxford American Interview
2. Bomb Interview
3. Vanity Fair Retrospective
4. New York Times Obituary
Posts
