According to Charney in his analysis of Hey Jack! the novel does "pay homage to such Faulkner novels as As I Lay Dying [1930] and The Mansion [1959]" with Homer's description of the decaying white-trash, nouveau-riche Foot family. However, the reader only gets glimpses of the family. In an interview, Hannah "describes them as the thinnest, most stereotypical characters in the novel." The author is continuing the Southern tradition of the raconteur where literature comes from the people who sit on the front porch, just as their fathers and mothers did before them.

Although Hannah speaks with a Southern voice, his fiction is contemporary.