In "Ray," Barry Hannah's startling new novel, set in the American South, we have come a long way from the hanging moss and stately columns of the antebellum era. In "Ray," we have come by way of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, and Harry Crews, to an image of the South that perhaps is best captured by Mr. Hannah's description of the Hooches' home in Tuscaloosa, Ala. "The others of the street are not of their homes as much as the Hooches. The loud and untidy failures of the Hooches pour from the exits. Their broken car is on the curb in front, pasted over with police citations. Around the base of a ragged bush near the front door is wrapped an old rotten brassiere. In the small front yard parts of toys and soaked food lie. A rope hangs from a second-story window. The drainpipe has been beaten out of place by the children."
Not that this is the only image of the new South that appears in "Ray." Indeed, it's remarkable how much of what we think of as quintessentially Southern has been worked into the 62 fragments that compose this brief fiction….
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