In recent weeks—somewhat to our suprise—we have run three front-page reviews of fiction by young American writers. Mary Gordon's "Final Payments" is her first novel; John Irving's "The World According to Garp" is his fourth; Barry Hannah's "Airships" is his first collection of stories, though he has already published two novels…. These young writers deserve praise: they are strong and original and clearly in touch with life, not just with literary games and fashions. Their books are very different in scale and subject and style, and each of them has a different literary strength: Mary Gordon has a sharp eye for character and social detail; John Irving has a large gift for narrative and structure; Barry Hannah has a distinctive comic voice. (p. 3)
Barry Hannah's stories in "Airships" are reverse chic: he has a casual redneck charm, a garrulous late-60's anarchy, with lots of sexist leering, a cast of Mississippi drunks, cuckolds and disarming liars, and an offhanded way with plot and structure. The speaker is always the same: he comes on as the voice of the New South, a Country-and-Western homme moyen sensuel, your average horny s.o.b., just trying to get along in his crazy violent American world. So Barry Hannah often sounds like a sour-mash William Saroyan. He is nothing if not charming, but he is also sloppy, self-indulgent, and writes as if a loose colloquiality were all there is to Vonnegut or Brautigan. What makes his stories unusual is that they have none of the creepy Spanish-moss effect of most "literary" Southern writing (Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor are, of course, the great exceptions), but are filled with a spontaneous regional sound: the voice of aggressively unsophisticated, reddust losers, Southern boys without big-town savvy. But this voice is all there really is to "Airships." Though Hannah has thrown in some New York, Vietnam and Civil War stories, the grotesqueries and apocalyptic 60's bits soon pall. Everything sounds the same. Heard one, heard 'em all. (p. 37)
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