Sign Languages: Stories

The amazing and the mysterious vitalize most of the nine stories in Sign Languages. Hannah's greatest strength is an ability to make his characters' transcendence of the ordinary convincing, in part because of his gift for language and the precision of his details, in greater part because of his larger vision. The amazing and the mysterious are not always pleasant experiences for his characters. They can be shattering; but they are always transforming, lifting these people to states beyond their commonplace selves.

Like Charles, alone in the house of his marriage and his family, his familiar world suddenly made strange, they recognize the depth of their alienation, discovering that they aren't who they thought they were and that they don't know who or what to be. Swept up into realms of existence totally foreign to them, they are drawn by compulsions beyond their understandings and beyond their wills.

At one level of his fiction, Hannah addresses the dilemma of communication and the failures of language to connect people. But at a deeper level, arising from the new states in which his characters find themselves, the languages of signs are portents, messages of forces beyond the merely human, beyond personal relationships and even the larger society. In a number of the stories, his protagonists are stripped of the trappings of their daily lives and become unaccommodated men and women, confronting powers that had once been beyond their imaginations and are now beyond their control.

In "Residue," Chris flees a woman in Texas to become part of a team surveying the wasteland topography of an Asian desert. In "Emollients," Nancy, young, beautiful, and successful, finds herself involved with her old and frail landlord, scrubbing off makeup until she is "a painful plain." In "Backyards," Richard, an austere CPA housesitting for his brother and sister-in-law, becomes a fascinated observer of a family of savage children.

Yet although the people can't articulate what is happening to them, can't interpret the signs literally, they understand that their new condition is thick with significance, of much greater importance than the lives they thought they were living.

While Hannah is a writer with a unique and convincing vision, his stories are not always or equally successful. The intensity of his creation is the most memorable aspect of his fiction, at times stronger than the shape of the story itself or the impact of its resolution.

WALTER CUMMINS Fairleigh Dickinson University

COPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning