BARRY HANNAH: YONDER STANDS YOUR ORPHAN
Circa 1990 I read everything I could get my hands on by Barry Hannah -- also Rick Bass, Tom McGuane, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, and Jim Harrison. This was the octane I was needing at the time, I guess, but Harrison is the only one I have revisited in what passes as my adult life. I also revisit Wright Morris from those years and will continue to do so. He is more Mose Allison to the rock and roll of these other guys.
So--this Barry Hannah novel sat on my shelf like a loud can of worms for many years. Finally, in one of those moods where it seems better to read books we have than buy new books (bizarre), I picked it up and got back into his world . This is why Tracy has heard me laughing out loud while reading, which is pretty rare for me--but the one liners in this are prime. It is good to be back in Hannah world--there is NO ONE who writes like him, no one as funny and musical and extreme.
This one hallucinates around a weird and lurid center without a protaganist to speak of, unless evil in the form of a pimp-pornogropher visited upon your rundown lake crew is one.
I kept thinking of the Roy Moore Republicans (in the news a decade and a half after this was published, and some years after Hannah's death). Even if it lacks some of the compression and focus of the early stuff, there is some very serious clowning around here, and I look forward to revisiting the other books.
Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.
― Yonder Stands Your Orphan