["Geronimo Rex"] belongs to an older tradition—the whining-adolescent novel of the fifties. The action begins in 1950, when the hero, Harry Monroe, is eight years old, and ends in the middle sixties, when he is married and a graduate student of English at the University of Arkansas. America broke in two in those years, when Johnson committed the half-million troops to Vietnam, and the new consciousness … figures in "Geronimo Rex" as a bleak dawn, an irony heavily in hock to despair, an accelerating incoherence in the never very tightly woven events that make up the novel's action…. The major weakness of a first novel like this is its limp susceptibility to autobiographical accident; its vitality must lie not in the shaping but in the language of the telling, and here Mr. Hannah is no mean performer. His whine is full-throated…. (p. 121)
With the verve of the young Bellow but with little of Bellow's love, Mr. Hannah can seize a person and hurl him into print…. The author does not shy from pushing an image into absurdity, and pulling it out on the other side…. Some of the metaphors carry the shock of real poetry…. (p. 122)
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