Tall Tales

By Paul Gray

AIRSHIPS by Barry Hannah Knopf; 209 pages; $8.95

With Geronimo Rex (1972), Barry Hannah emerged as a first novelist with an innate gift for gab. His mockepic saga of growing up wacky during the '50s and '60s hummed down the groove of black humor but spun with Southern English. Hannah revealed an ear for the palaver that still goes on around Confederate monuments, as well as for the eloquent cadences of Faulkner and Joyce.

Talents as broad and wide as this thrive in novels but rarely take to the more constricting form of the short story. Airships proves Hannah an exception. Though a few of the 20 pieces included here fall flat, most are artfully rounded-off vignettes jumping with humor and menace. And the stories bounce off and echo one another, giving the book an impact greater than the sum of its parts.

Hannah's forte is spinning tall tales around short people. His characters seem to have been stunted and stunned by life; they are accidents wandering around, trying to find out why they happened. Fate denies them selfdiscovery, sometimes in ludicrous ways. A Mississippi-born tennis pro falls into a river and comes close enough to drowning to survive only as a vegetable. The Oedipal tangle that led to his accident will never be his to grasp.

The fact that Hannah's characters and settings are chiefly Southern lends the book a flowery tang. "Beauty is fleeting," says a woman in one story. "What stays is your basic endurance of pettiness and ennui." Though Hannah readily exploits the southerner's license to orate, he is not especially interested in regional manners. His real concern is with the hollering, clawing passions that manners are supposed to civilize. Hannah likes to rend the social fabric and examine what's underneath. Two of his stories are apocalyptic, set during worldwide calamities that turn people savage. Three others take place amid the carnage fo the Civil War. One is set in Viet Nam.

This lineup sounds grim, and some of it is. Hannah's penchant for using violence to get himself out of stories does not always work. The narrator of Coming Close to Donna bashes a woman's head with a tombstone. How come? Because he gives her what she wants. The end. Random calamities may be the order of the day in real life, but that is precisely why truth is stranger than fiction. Art demands more. Hannah provides it often enough. He does not revel in the macabre: he uses it to create sudden emptiness, black holes that demand contemplation. Why, while a housewife is napping and dreaming of sex, does the husband come home and fall into the cellar? Even at their worst, such things are pitched slightly comic and askew. Hannah's voice becomes distinctive as the stories proceed, a rolling mixture of roadhouse macho and ginmill sentimentality, marvelously suited for both shenanigans and self-parody Most young souther writers resent being compared to such past giants as Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. In embracing the gothic mode. Hannah, 35, has planted himself firmly on their turf. On the evidence of Airships, their shadows are not stunting his growth. -- Paul Gray

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