I'm reading everything the late Hannah wrote. Starts here. Starts strong.

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Long, (over 300 pages), bildungsroman. Secondary character Fleece more interesting and likable than main protagonist, Harry. Other secondary characters interesting, but are kept far in the background. Harley Butte should have had equal time as Harry, but then it wouldn’t have been a coming-of-age novel. Very different in style than what Hannah would later produce. ( )

About as far as I made it, in Barry Hannah’s novel Geronimo Rex, “It would be Sousa again. Sousa bolder, Sousa better, Sousa even more uncanny.” If trumpets, John Phillip Sousa, and visits to “niggertown” (Hannah’s name for a local community), are your cup of joe, you might try it out. It wasn’t my cup and I quit.

There was other stuff I didn’t enjoy either. Yet, despite all that disgruntlement, Hannah’s talent did impress me—his language, his smarts, the bold sense of humor that risks misfiring. It’s easy to imagine he was a hellacious guy to hang with. I’d be willing to try something else by him. Just not this.

I like that title, though.

Thomas McGuane dedicated his story collection Crow Fair to Hannah. A good testimonial in deciding if you’d like to try Barry Hannah’s books. ( )

Geronimo Rex, a southern coming-of-age story, was Barry Hannah’s first novel. Harry, Harriman Monroe, grows up in Dream of Pines, Louisiana, where his father owns a mattress factory. In high school, where “we were all crazy about beauty and power,” Harry feels “as ugly as a shotgunned butt of pork, and you love everything and hate everything at the same time.”

He attends college in Mississippi, “a rectangle of poor woe” in a school where “a number of people seemed to have come….so as to use the college as a sort of proving ground for their afflictions, wanting to know how far they could push into the world before it spat them out.”

Even in this early novel Hannah was using language to devastating effect, which makes him one of the most quotable authors around, to me. A high school marching band is so sublime “they made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere” and “was like a river tearing down a dam when they played.” He describes “the patient boiling holocaust of the drums” as they approach a parade and are about to play.

Geronimo Rex is a young man’s book and doesn’t have the entire repertoire of Hannah’s later works, but is an astonishingly good book on its own. ( )