Bats out of Hell. - book reviews

Guns and gonads, symbols of our violent, sex-crazed times. So observes one of Barry Hannah's characters in a tale among the 23 pieces gathered in this collection of Hannah's short stories, the first since the publication of Airships, a work often described as a modern classic. Here again are lives filled with violence, drunkenness, lust, disillusionment, emptiness, brutality, hopelessness, and anger. But here also we find loyalty, concern, friendship, gentleness, a quest for stability, and love. In short, these stories reflect the Hannah that readers have grown to expect, but they also register a maturing vision of Southern (and American) life. They capture the growth of a social critic while still revealing a master's wizardry with language.

Hannah's social criticism refuses to be preachy but is nonetheless pointed. Americans turn too rapidly to drugs, booze, cults, fads, and sex as recreation. They drift, they delude themselves, they despise others differing from themselves, and they not only bum their candles at both ends but set them ablaze in their middles in their quest for sensual excitement. They may be lushes at one moment, bicycling Mormons at another, wielders of guns or spouters of verse. They are moderns, Victorians, conservative, liberal, lost, depraved, humane, bestial, Gothic, hip, introspective, rambunctious, quiet. They are America in microcosmic essence. Hannah thus invites us to see ourselves and our nation in these pages. What we see can both darken and brighten our view of what our nation has become.

He draws old men, young ones, boys, lonely women, burnt-out souls who have hit the bottle much too hard or drugs too frequently. He gives us writers, fathers, confused children, prim aunts, lunatic soldiers, concerned fathers, prodigal sons, adventuresome daughters, and more. A rich variety of characters inhabits these pages, additional proof that Hannah has a major talent.

One marked difference from Airships is Hannah's greater use of extremely short short stories. The briefest is "Dear Awfull Diary," less than a half page. Like "Mother Mouth," a little short of two full pages, it gets the job done, snippet though it appears to be.

Much longer are "Slow Times in Long School" and "Hey, Have You Got a Cig?". The first treats a class reunion and the memories that occasion evokes, the second a father's recital of what happens to his wayward son, poet, teacher, drunk, Mormon, and schoolmaster at a school for delinquent youths. Absorbing treatment of American manners and mores appears also in "The Vision of Esther by Clem" and "Scandale d'Estime."

Hannah's themes cover hunting, drinking, winning and losing love, gaining and sacrificing friendship, dealing with the opposite sex, finding or losing one's niche in life, battling alcohol and drugs, losing or preserving integrity of body and soul. His characters range far beyond the bubbas, belles, and bitches that are supposed by some critics to inhabit Southern fiction. Crackers, geezers, crackpots, introspective old men and women, musicians, soldiers, semiliterate hillbillies, and a rat-faced aunt do show a kinship with the grotesques of Faulkner and O'Connor, but these characters, when viewed closely, clearly bear the stamp "Made by Hannah."

Rich and varied though his themes and characters are, Hannah's real triumph comes in his knack for finding just the fight language, whether it be the epistolary art of the narrator of "That Was Close, Ma," the hickish confidences of "Evening of the Yarp: A Report by Roonswent Dover," or the brisk sentences of the cocky brigadier general who narrates "Upstairs, Mona Bayed for Dong." Hannah's ears are finely attuned, and, thankfully, he gives us dialects and even idiolects without forcing us to become linguists to enjoy his stories. Besides a fine discrimination of voice and manner, Hannah's style bubbles with energy. But it is not only hip, for Hannah can rise to the demands of poetry and philosophic musing. Happily, his style never calls attention to itself. Hannah can use what he needs, can convince readers that the voices they hear are authentic, and can refrain from overburdening his stories with numbing description or leisurely developed exposition. To be blunt, Hannah refuses to let his stories drag.

Bats Out of Hell offers both less and more than Airships. The latter offered crisper, often more focused tales with a memorable array of characters. Bats Out of Hell seems to favor the soapbox to the dramatic stage, the result being ultimately a less engaging book than the earlier collection. This is but to say that Hannah has joined ranks with Steinbeck, Dreiser, Mark Twain, Faulkner, and a host of others in donning the mantle of the social critic.

He is not the first to learn that "You Can't Go Home Again," and he will not be the last to dramatize the ills besetting American society. The volume shows that Hannah increasingly sees his role as that of a writer dedicated to reaffirming the values that helped shape this nation.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group