Airships by Barry Hannah

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers.  They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner was dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?

"Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed," one of the best stories in Barry Hannah's collection Airships, is narrated by a Confederate officer who meets his hero, Jeb Stuart. General Stuart suggests that the officer shake hands with his Black ensign, George, something the narrator hasn't done and isn't too happy about being constrained to do now. Except George takes one look at the narrator and correctly clocks that his interest in the General exceeds the bounds of simple admiration: "Ain't shaking hands with no nancy." I wonder if a reader from outside the South might find the humor in this, or if it would only confirm certain at-least-partly-true suspicions about the South. For my part, I love the way the story skewers the myths and pieties of the Old South. None of these people--not the officer, nor the ensign, nor even Jeb, a towering figure in Southern legend who's clearly happy with the myths he inspires--is quite what they seem. They're not too far off, in fact, from the whopping fish-tale swappers of the opening story, "Water Liars."

Many of the stories in Airships are about the South, though what they have to say about it is not always easy to parse. Mostly, I think, they tend to see the South as a place where, perhaps contrary to its reputation as a place of rigid social hierarchies, grand collisions happen. I was really delighted by "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa," a story about a white guy who chides a Black one for eating a banana with too much enthusiasm, which ends with the Black guy coming over to the white one's house to watch him eat bananas. Some of the stories are snappy and short, but the collection is held up by a series of longer novellas, the plots of which are so ridiculous I'm not sure I even want to waste time describing them. Take, for instance, "Return to Return," a story about a talented young tennis player driven mad by the attentions of his mother's long-time lover; is it even worth talking about how he ends up with a shady doctor named Baby, stabbing people in Central Park? It's a little easier, maybe, to guess how we get from the homemade mortar shells of "The Testimony of Pilot" to the fighter jets of the Second World War. These stories proceed by a strange logic, almost more like an unraveling then a building up--nothing about them is predictable.

Hannah shares DNA, I think, with a writer like Charles Portis: both write shaggy-dog stories about Southerners that are wildly funny. But Hannah's stories have a disquieting strangeness underneath them that begins with the way they pack a truly staggering amount of information into a paragraph, a sentence: check out that first paragraph above from "Green to Green," which piles absurdity upon absurdity. As a result, Hannah's prose is decidedly clunky and unmusical, though I don't even mean that as a criticism. The shorter ones have the air of someone flipping over a bag and letting all their bobs and bits onto a table; the longer ones can be said, by their end, to make a certain kind of sense, though I would challenge you to identify that sense at their beginning. All in all, I found them frequently difficult to penetrate, but always incredibly funny, energetic, and fun.