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Title: Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah ISBN: 0-8021-3893-4 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.38 (13 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Not to be read passively
Comment: I'm a fan of Barry Hannah; ever since I read "Airships" I've been hooked. ("Testimony of Pilot," from that collection, is simply the best short story I've ever read.)
In my opinion, this novel isn't his best work--I think the characterizations, though admiringly strange, aren't as coherent as I expected--but this book is still worth reading, if you enjoy a challenge.
While someone like Don DeLillo has gotten more and more remote, "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" brings us in. We may not like the world it creates, but it's its own world, nonetheless.
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant Prose Beats a Good Day Fishing
Comment: If Barry Hannah were James Joyce, 'Yonder Stands Your Orphan' would be his 'Ulysses.' By that I mean this isn't the place to start reading him, but if you've been blooded by his short stories or earlier novels and liked them - well then "Yonder" is your basic "towering work of staggering genius." I intend no irony, nor do I contend the book is perfect...just startlingly original.
At its core "Yonder" contemplates good and evil. Early on in the novel, a married couple crucify themselves, only later to resurrect their vows and return to the same house and raise orphans...negligently. The main antagonist, an entrepreneurial pimp named "Man Mortimer" is either evil, or going insane, depending upon your politics. At any rate, he's a menace to a lakeside society (somewhere up the Yazoo) that's too preoccupied with fishing and SUV's to perceive the threat. As he hacks away at the populace "Man" (who takes a stiletto to the testicles fighting over his lover) grows ever smaller and more childish. The cosmetic surgery his victims require makes them resemble their attacker -- a dead ringer for Conway Twitty. A few preachers and an ex-doctor, (become a jazz musician,) notice something is amiss, but their deeds and commitments are too ingrained to stop "Man" from going bad to worse. A much despised and yearning sheriff would rather do drama than police work. About halfway through the book the plot took off for me. Then I couldn't stop reading because I wanted to know what would stop this Man.
On the way to the end "Yonder" made me laugh aloud. Hannah is juvenile enough to name a character Sidney Farte, (his character is summarized in a single phrase the he shouts at a wedding, but it's too perverse, funny and sad to quote on Amazon) but deft enough to make me feel -- and understand -- his life of disappointment and rage. In that it reminded me a bit of Harry Crews.
It IS true, however, that you need a scorecard to keep track of the characters. On top of that Hannah isn't always blatant about signaling point of view changes and can't be bothered explaining every topical reference. (He seems to be a voracious consumer of high and low culture.) Reading between the lines is obligatory here and even so the most indulgent reader will occasionally have to sacrifice a sentence to the gods of Hannah-world. Like Pynchon, he doesn't meet you half way - but to a very different end. "Yonder" isn't a literary puzzle, but it makes sense that Hannah's novels are less appreciated than his shorter fiction. Brevity mitigates the reader's risk in a short story. Less is asked of us before reaching the payoff.
Reading a novel so laden with sub-subtext IS challenging too. Hannah's point of view is more intimate than 'in their shoes,' 'on their shoulder,' or even 'through their eyes.' He seems to spin tales from inside the characters' cerebral cortex, scrotum...or occasionally the left ventricle of their ailing heart. That can be disorienting - almost any reader will occasionally have to back up and to get their bearings again - but you're motivated to figure things out because their warped loquacity is what makes his idiosyncratic characters genuinely compelling. In other words "Yonder" is no-holds-barred literary fiction. If you find the style disconcerting, read his earlier work or just keep going and you'll find the beat. When you do let yourself be immersed the prose grows addictive, occasionally inducing transcendence.
Some readers see 'Yonder' as a condemnation of the South. Twaddle. It laments all of "Big Mart" America, not any specific geography or demographic. The character closest to Hannah's point of view (in that Raymond plays sax with the same be-bop syntax and sensibility as his creator) declares:
"A zombie had just waited on him in the pawnshop, a man who stood there remarking on the history of his saxophone. In apparently good health, in decent clothes and well groomed, polite, but quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond. You look at them and know they are spaces into otherness. Not adolescent either, that natural Teutonic drifting or the sullenness without content. They might still be people, but unlikely.
Everything about the zombie is ravaged except his obsession, thought Raymond, following the red car. Dead to every other touch. They simply imitate when there is movement or sound. They imitate the conversations around them to seem human to one another. He had seen them in scores from the airports to the bandstand imitating one another, mimicking the next mimicker in no time, no space, no place, no history.
The bad restaurant even had bad-food loungers and loiterers, hard to shake when they got a good imitation of you going. The restaurant with its RESTAURANT sign. Its mimicking of the dining life, yet no edible food, bad water and a weak tea to go with that. 'Refill that beige for you, sir?' Every dish served in contempt for what used to be human. Rations for an unannounced war."
That's as blatant as Hannah gets - he even italicized some of the original to let you see he's on a soapbox - but reviewers persist in reading his work as a collection of 'colorful' southern eccentrics lacking a larger context. The idea that this is just a collection of "Barry's brilliant sentences" sells the work short, not to mention its author. Despite the orphans, this is a book written about an aging community, for adults, by a man who was confronting potentially terminal cancer. The book's title is a lyric from Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," but this novel has the 'nothing to lose' tone of Dylan's later work: "Time out of Mind." Both are work by men who have honed their craft for decades, ruminated and reached some conclusions. And like Dylan, Hannah has made his peace without giving an inch. This book is the result and it's a wonder!
Rating: 2
Summary: Incomprehensible
Comment: I haven't read a book like this since I had to read Gravity's Rainbow in college; I didn't understand that one either. The more enlightened might argue that one needs to suspend convention when reading a book like this. I would respond by asking such a person to explain the story; their blank stare will betray them. Say that Hannah is writing "beat" or he's "bold and original", per the critical comments on the back cover. Just don't say he writes with any clarity.
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Title: Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah ISBN: 0802135692 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Airships by Barry Hannah ISBN: 0802133886 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Ray by Barry Hannah ISBN: 0802133878 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Rich in Love by Josephine Humphreys ISBN: 0140296107 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 05 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Father and Son : Winner of the Southern Book Award by Larry Brown ISBN: 0805053034 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 15 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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