When Good Old Boys Crack Up
ROMANO, JOHN
When Good Old Boys Crack Up Ray By Barry Hannah Knopf. 113 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by John Romano Department of English, Columbia University, author, "Dickens and Reality In its peculiar way—and...
...Aimless whacking on the head is painlessly absorbed, as if absurdity were anesthetic —a thesis Hannah proposes from time to time...
...I have seen the moon hot and the sun cold...
...Which South might be gathered from the following: "This was a friendly city, Tuscaloosa, though there were sirens to be heard most parts of the day and the state asylum across the way was full...
...Faulkner flew in the face of that promise...
...The comparison reviewers have rushed to, in contending with his considerable talents, is Faulkner...
...It is only vis-a-vis the novel's smalltown citizens—the Hooch family, for instance, who are the most lovable white trash anyone has dared to portray in any medium—that Ray is a compelling character...
...When I get out of here, I'mgoingto kill all those sons of bitches, Doctor.'" The book is crowded—slim as it is?with similar random evils...
...Indeed, his convincing show of being demi-heroic makes him inordinately, wildly attractive to women throughout the book...
...Eliot's enthusiasm for Virginia: Because it had a class system and entire generations tended to live out their lives in the same locale, Eliot believed that the rational mind and the mind of faith might find a home there...
...They were inseparable companions, and the man in black always tipped the clerk five dollars for a Coca-Cola at the Jiffy Mart...
...That description can pass as a pictorial summation of Barry Hannah's world: It has the lyricism and silliness-with-a-straight-face of a Steinberg cartoon...
...He had a heart attack and he was in intensive care, all hooked up to the machines and the monitors...
...Few writers are confident enough in their ability to sour Whitman so convincingly, but Hannah is unflinching and courageous in his talent...
...Ray answers, "Well, hell...
...The postmoral protest against absurdity and violence, the exuberant sex and the mordant comedy work powerfully well in Hannah's third novel...
...Ray of the title knows about them since he is a doctor: "Yes, I have seen the rain coming down on a sunny day...
...All too predictably, he winds up in the local asylum...
...The last sentence of the paragraph, locating the man in black "at the Jiffy Mart," is wonderful...
...I lost him!' I screamed...
...Then something happens inside Ray (who has seen too much, starting with Vietnam) and he not only stops stitching up certain perpetrators, but he does a little retributive perpetrating himself...
...Ray's oversexed nurse knows better: "You killed him...
...A whole philosophy of people and things being exactly where they belong, exactly where you last saw them, is subtended by then-wry, parochial geography...
...One recalls, in this connection, T.S...
...Ray lacks the punch of his earlier collection...
...Yet that will surely come to him in time, once the present gorgeous, telling, lyric rant is over...
...Despite the background of violence and disorder—the sirens and the asylum are near—its immediate subject is quaintly untroubled, just as Steinberg's multicolored, melodramatic smears of mauve and blue and red coexist with simpler line-drawing...
...He wanted to talk to me...
...Theprotag-onist's personal life is overdone, superficial and boring...
...Thus the American South held some chance for Eliot—and for the New Critics and others—of surviving the general wreck of consciousness in the present century...
...I know too many goddamned people, too many wretched Americans at this point...
...The nurse suddenly asks, "You want to get it on, Doctor Ray...
...Ray merely happens to work in a hospital, where he has to repair its victims...
...It is odd, therefore, that he cannot do the simpler thing—relate an unconventional story...
...But the curious thing about Hannah is that he is both Steinbergian and Jiffy Mart-ish...
...Reviewed by John Romano Department of English, Columbia University, author, "Dickens and Reality In its peculiar way—and its way is endlessly peculiar—Ray is a novel of the South...
...Between the hours of healing, I dream of dropping the ace on home real estate in hopes that many citizens will get trapped inside in the wide handshake of phosphorous...
...The same is true of the more diffuse afflictions of life in Hannah's South...
...Airships, however...
...I have always been struck by ho w Southern writers refer to local spots back home...
...As in the case of the violent 80 year-old: "I told everybody to get out of the room and I bent down my face and looked him straight in the eye...
...What are you going to do when I get you on your feet again?' '"Kill the sons of bitches!' "I yanked out the connections and shut down the monitors and let him pass over the light into hell...
...On the streets you might see such as this: a small man wearing a football helmet walking in front of a man in a black suit and white Panama hat, the larger man in black frequently striking the smaller one over the helmet with a broom handle...
...Nevertheless, Hannah's robust, though flawed, poetry saves this side of Ray, especially when we hear Whitman's "I"s gone bad: "I am looking at the swelling hordes...
...I have seen needless death and I have seen needless life...
...One old mule of eighty came into theemergency room who had abused three wives, beaten his youngest son, twelve, with a tire tool, and had borrowed from everybody in Gordo...
...At home, having affairs, drunk and alone, with his kids, Ray is boozy-unbearable...
...and I suppose the reason is that Faulkner, too, exploits the paradox of absurd experience set in a landscape famous for making sense...
...This Dickensian profligacy of minorcharac-ters is a sign of a great and healthy imagination that does not need to hoard its images of human possibility, conceiving of them as being more or less boundless...
...Furthermore, we will never again see the acutely bizarre pair...
...I have seen almost everything dependable go against its nature...
...The scourge called Flem Snopes made as little sense as the ones called Dachau and Hiroshima and Thalidomide, and yet he was a pure-bred Southern product...
...By the time the crew came in, I had all the stuff going again...
...We live in the anxious, disordered world rendered by Steinberg, so the firmness of place and time embodied in Hannah's easy "Jiffy Mart" ought to strike envy in our hearts and it does...
...You have only to watch your local news broadcast, read smalltown papers or the New York Daily News to know how commonplace they are—and the knowledge is important for appreciating that Hannah is not making a metaphor out of the purposeless violence in American life...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 23
