I know Hannah is a beloved figure (lavish blurbs on this edition from Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Alfred Kazin, James Dickey), but this doesn't do anything for me. Ray a miscellany of edgy zaniness that we're apparently supposed to accept quite soberly as a literary correlate of "the American confusion." Narrated Beckett-style from a hospital bed by Dr. Ray of Tuscaloosa after he has some kind of alcoholic crack-up, it meanders through tales of the town's eccentrics and through Ray's memories of Vietnam and the Civil War ("I live in so many centuries. Everybody is still alive."). There are some nice lyrical passages, mainly about the beautiful women Ray has loved, and some of the theater-of-the-absurd stuff is funny when it isn't trying too hard to shock with racial slurs and punny sex farce ("Afterward I ate her slowly. I hadn't eaten much all day."). Anyway, the elephant in the room here is Gordon Lish, who apparently edited the hell out of the book, to Hannah's satisfaction according to this researcher. The text is full of Lishey sentences and paragraphs that allow themselves to be led down cul-de-sacs by their own sounds and rhythms: She ate me, just like another delicious thing on her menu. I felt rotten, cool, and unfaithful, yet I came with an enormous lashing of sperm, which made her writhe and lick.(This one jumped out at me because "writhe and lick" recalls a passage in friend-of-Lish DeLillo in which a woman's breasts "jump and hum," a phrase James Wood made righteous fun of back in the day.)None of this would bother me if Lish/Hannah didn't expect me to take it all as a serious statement on America and how violent and crazy it is. Not that America isn't, necessarily--I follow the news!--but a novel has to earn its themes not just gesture toward them in a way that flatters the right-thinking audience. Zany, vulgar comedy can be its own reward, and I would have accepted this as a distant ancestor of Family Guy; considered as a sociopolitical novel, though, it just doesn't exist. Why, you ask, would I even want to consider it as a sociopolitical novel? Probably because of the obviously Lish-authored and just-this-side-of-meaningless jacket copy on the first-edition hardcover I have out of the library:The case for Ray is the case for the dogged citizen, the last warrior in the American epoch. He is the fool in flight from the safety of falling out of time and away from complication. He is, instead, the intrepid witness, willfully and disastrously present for the felonious spectacle of family, community, and nation.Notice the unworkable combination of a sentence constructed out of its own echoing parts--all the consonance and assonance, words chosen primarily for sound and shape--with a grandiose thesis statement. This kind of writing is all over the book, and it just doesn't work. It represents the neo-classicalizing of modernism. Yes, Faulkner, Woolf, and Lawrence wrote sentences that had the inevitability and solidity of poetry, but they did so not for the sheer hell of it but rather under the pressure of their themes, to which they abandoned themselves totally, whereas this novel reads like a collection of carefully-constructed sentences in search of a theme, sliding from nihilistic farce to outright sentimentality without modulation. And the sentimentality is the most convincing part! Hannah seems, like Carver, to have been a kind of instinctive if disappointed humanist, somebody who might have gone in a more Dreiserian direction if Captain Fiction hadn't intervened (this is in contrast to somebody like DeLillo, whose stylizations feel holistic, the emanation of a genuine worldview, not something imposed from above). To end on a more positive note, I liked this passage; it has a quietness in it that more of the novel could have been built on, instead of pursuing Civil War fantasies and tall tales from Southern living, so I'll end here:I'm dreaming of the day when the Big C will be blown away. I'm dreaming of a world where men and women have stopped the war and where we will stroll as naked as excellent couples under the eye of the sweet Lord again. I'm dreaming of the children whom I have hurt from being hurt and the hurt they learn, the cynicism, the precocious wit, the poo-poo, the slanted mouth, the supercilious eyebrow.Then I wake up and I'm smiling. Westy asks me what's wrong."Christ, darling, I just had a good dream, is all.""I'll bet it was some patient you screwed. You rotten bastard."She hits me over the head with a pillow.Violence.Some days, even a cup of coffee is violence.When I can find my peace, I take a ladder to the hot attic and get out the whole plays of Shakespeare.Okay, old boy. Let's hear it again. Sweat's popping out of my eyes, forehead.Let's hear it again. Between the lines I'm looking for the cure for cancer.
Ray is a white man of privilege back in a time when that still meant something, a medical doctor, who both clings to his status and loathes it. Barry gives Ray a narrative voice that is stunning, lyrical, ugly, poignant, and mean as a snake.on Maynard Castro, a preacher who commits murder:"In their secret hearts, such perversities as Maynard know there are things they can never have, things they have wanted with all their hearts. So they kill them. Most preachers are this way. Their messages seem benevolent, but they are more evil than the rest of us walking pavement." (54)On Charlie DeSoto, a decent man in a complicated world: "My town now is Tuscaloosa. I want you to know about some of the people here. My friend Charlie DeSoto, for example. He and his sweetheart Eileen came in, both of them wanting the drug that would help them stay in love without the grinding nervousness they had, because they WERE in love and they wanted to make it stick. Yet they induced tension in each other. Charlie was going for the booze, Eileen for the Compazines and coffee."The name DeSoto was important, Charlie thought. He's a manager of the soap factory to the south of town and has made happen important steps toward antipollution of the Black Warrior River, into which his factory used to dump all the chemical wastes it had. It killed fish, and generally screwed up the water vegetation for fifteen miles downriver."One night Charlie was waked up by a noise in his backyard. He caught hold of his hatchet, hoping it was a criminal, for his life had been dull lately. But when he went out doors in the cold air, DeSoto - who was of course the namesake of Hernando de Soto, the discoverer of the Mississippi River who perished in 1542, probably of greed and arrogance - saw there was no criminal. The man in the back yard was not running. He was crawling, almost wallowing, toiling on the brown rye grass of Charlie's yard. The man lifted his face and said, 'Listen, friend, I can't take it anymore.'" (11-12)the poor white trash Hooch family:"The stacked tires, the station wagon half-captured by kudzu and ivy, the fishing boat on wheels, the tops of an ash and a pine rising from the falling ravine behind the backyard, and in front, the house, a peeling eyesore, the complaint of the neighborhood. The Hooches!"The Hooch children are afraid. The car seems to have plunged up from the ravine. The smaller Hooches are fearful."The roof of the garage has fallen in and around it clay pots are scattered through the lustrous ragged fronds."The Hooch family is large and poor."I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny."Time and time again it comes back. Where the Hooches buried Oscar in the backyard near the fallen garage. Where the broken flowerpots were pulled away to make a place for Oscar. Where a single white wild blossom occurred under the forever stunted fig tree, making no sense at all, certainly not for dead Oscar."The others of the street are not of their homes as much as the Hooches. The loud and untidy failures of the Hooches pour from the exits. Their broken car is on the curb in front, pasted over with police citations. Around the base of a ragged bush near the front door is wrapped an old rotten brassiere. In the small front yard parts of toys and soaked food lie. A rope hangs from a second-story window. The drainpipe has been beaten out of place by the children."The Hooch family has a familiar, I am saying, a certain familiar joyful lust and ignorance. They are mine. They're Ray's."I say they are mine." (5-6)
Do You like book Ray (1994)?
This is hardly a novel. In just over a hundred pages it has 62 chapters. That just about beats Vonnegut. Some of the chapters are one sentence long and make no sense at all, like a lot of the book. This is supposedly the musings of a drug-fueled, promiscuous doctor as he lies in a hospital bed after a bender, but there is very little story, and what story there is doesn't amount to much. Some of the sections deal with the doctor's experiences flying jets in Vietnam, and others deal with the Civil War, and there is no explanation for this in the continuity of the story. (The explanation is that Hannah likes to write about Vietnam and the Civil War, and since this is more a collection of anecdotes and situations than a narrative, why not include everything?) Some of it is funny and amusing and the whole thing is very playful, but it is awfully repetitive. Half the chapters end with some kind of sexual episode, some of it seemingly tacked on just for the hell of it, and it gets to be like hearing the same joke for the fiftieth time. Hannah may have had talent, but it wasn't as a novelist.
—Aaron Martz
This is the first novel I've read in months and the first time I've read anything by famed Southern writer, Barry Hannah. I'm impressed by his menagerie of characters and his unique prose stylings, which leans heavily on another literary art, poetry. Ray's story is told by a first person omniscient narrator, but the thing is the narrator refers to himself in third person throughout, which is slightly disconcerting and highly adventurous. Here, check out this page one action:Ray, you are a doctor and you are in a hospital in Mobile, except now you are a patient but you're still me. Say what? You say you want to know who I am? I have a boat on the water. I have magnificent children. I have a wife who turns her beauty on and off like a light switch.The novella-sized novel is set in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Ray, the protagonist, is a sex-addicted doctor with a vivid imagination and a head full of Vietnam War fighter pilot experiences to match. I would describe the book as breezy. It's a breeze to read in one setting, and the reading leaves one with a mossy breeze on the palate. in the way a good Scotch might.
—David Burn
Sabers, gentlemen, sabers!Someday Barry Hannah will get his due as one of the greatest American writers. Sure, all his books have been critically acclaimed and he enjoys a healthy cult following, but this man deserves to be a household name. His books should be taught in schools, his name should be whispered in tones of mythic reverence. "Ray" is a concentrated blast of what makes Barry Hannah unique and wonderful, 113 slim pages of distilled genius. You will not forget it. And if you happen to live in Ohio...sorry.BUMPED 03/01/10 -- Barry Hannah has just died. I've only read this novel plus his short story collection Airships, but both are absolutely essential. Hannah was an incredible writer, one of the best prose stylists I have read, incapable of writing a dull sentence. His sentences transcend his prosaic medium and become something unnamable, unpredictable, utterly beautiful. Read this book, and anything else by Hannah you can get your hands on. At 67, he's left us too soon.
—Krok Zero
