Rude Noises

By Paul Gray

Fiction once provided a stomping ground for the crazed or eccentric. When the ideal of civilized behavior combined decorum and good manners, books could offer an escape into the manias of Heathcliff, Ahab and Raskolnikov, or into the stubborn individualism of Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. Heroes and heroines who would surely disrupt any public society could be avidly followed in private. But as daily life grows more clamorous and abrasive, as violence enters the home regularly by way of TV or flesh-and-blood carriers, serious fiction shows signs of moving in the opposite direction. Novels and story collections tumble off the presses, filled with sensitive college graduates who would not harm a fly. Male characters wonder what it means to be men. Female characters wonder what it means to be women. Sometimes, in moments of high drama, the sexes notice and ponder the mysteries of one another.

Against this background of gentle murmurings, Author Barry Hannah, 43, persists in making rude noises. Captain Maximus, his sixth book and second collection of stories, is full of spite, rage, booze and unregenerate boorishness. Not one of Hannah's two-fisted protagonists or narrators would perform well at a dinner party or charity bazaar. They resist gentrification. They hang around in scuzzy bars, wallowing in anarchic musings: "I thought of my books, my children, and the fact that almost everybody sells used cars or dies early. I used to get so angry about this issue that I would drag policemen out of their cars."

Such a statement intentionally blurs the line between truth and bravado. Hannah's speakers, Southerners almost to the man, habitually treat language as action, words as deeds. Roger Laird, the hero of Getting Ready, worries over his many and expensive failures to catch "a significant fish." Finally, some 30 miles south of Panama City, he manages to haul in a sand shark from the surf. Though it lacks the grandeur he had imagined, this experience proves exhilarating enough to lead him to his life's next great task. He moves to Dallas, builds a pair of 8-ft. stilts and wades around a local lake, screaming obscenities at the rich people in boats motoring by. The narrator of Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter also finds himself in Texas, which offends him: "Dallas, city of the fur helicopters. Dallas--computers, plastics, urban cowboys with schemes and wolf shooting in their hearts." He hops on his black motorcycle and heads back to where he belongs: "The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl."

Along with its characteristic redneck riffs, Captain Maximus provides a surprising counterpoint. The last and longest of the eight stories has nothing at all to do with the South. Subtitled "An Idea for Film," Power and Light jumps and pans and crosscuts its way around Seattle. Hardworking women come intermittently into focus. Polly Buck, for example, labors at the City Lights Powerhouse: "This girl is chaining your breakfast together, citizen. She is hitching the light up for your asinine patio party, your old starlight teevee movies, your electric toothbrush, vibrator, Magic Fingers." Maureen, a black woman who supports her heroin-addicted brother, operates a shipyard crane. She, Polly and three or four other sisters in honest toil are being vaguely menaced by a Eurasian man, who writes them inscrutable mash notes. Also spying on them, flickeringly, is a peculiar fellow with a white bulldog. While presenting these enigmatic events, Hannah's ordinarily vivid prose seems flattened toward objectivity. Scenery is telescoped: "Aero-scan of birds, all kinds of seabirds, sea, Puget Sound with boat life, wharfs, seals, howling noisy seabirds again, here and there a helicopter." Background music is summoned: "Beethoven comes on with a power symphony and we hear grand strains of German pomposity."

Yet even when he controls his impulse to wail, Hannah remains a distinctive, disturbing voice. Longtime fans continue to wonder when he will again reach the comic breadth and scope of Geronimo Rex (1972), his dazzling first novel. Certainly not this time. Captain Maximus is almost aggressively fragmentary. But Hannah's brand of disorderly conduct, even in bits and pieces, remains a welcome reminder that art can be just as wild and unpredictable as daily life. --By Paul Gray