"Geronimo Rex" is a stunning piece of entertainment, almost a totally successful book…. Hannah is one of those young writers who is brilliantly drunk with words and could at gunpoint write a life story of a telephone pole. He strains for the bon mot and comes up with half a dozen….

"Geronimo Rex" is vulgar, sexual, ribald and wildly comic. The writing is intricate enough to make it hard to believe that it's really a first novel. The hero, Harriman Monroe, is taken from age 12 to 24, a rather stupidly formless idea but sweet and inevitable here; a sort of Nonnus act of making "a heap of all I have met."

"Geronimo Rex" presents a South that appears strikingly more lively and contemporary than the North. No auspicious ancestors and drooling dwarfs and hyper-sexed Georgia peaches here, though there is the believable panoply of racism, youthful corruption and a...