Barry Hannah

When I get sick and tired of reading, I read Barry Hannah. 

When I read Barry Hannah those little Mississippi towns, the ones with hollowed out, dead 'downtowns' that don't have a chance in hell of coming back to life but just keep drifting and drifting deeper into their abandonment, towns like Merigold and Winona, throw out their weird welcome signs toward me. Reading Hannah, towns like Ruleville and Marks, towns I passed through on my way to and from Oxford, always finding something surprising in them, something I hadn't known about myself and American history, those little towns of such glorious downtrodden spirit where a blues museum or a statue of a civil rights leader appear as part of a landscape so real it seems a part of my imagination, improbable but true, are all right there in front of me so that I can pass through them slowly, once again.

Hannah's voice is so companionable--alert and folksy--that it's terrifying. It's what you might hear through the walls of the hotel in Greenville: is the couple arguing or are they making love? When you turn the page it's possible you'll hear a shotgun blast, or the silence that is the complete opposite but just as lethal. You won't know which it is until morning, after the cops have arrived and the corpse is being wheeled down the hallway.

Truth is, Hannah is really funny. He's the one hovering over your grandma's coffin, standing with you and your little brother, saying how good she looks, that she's never looked better, her white face caked with make-up but as unlined as a teenager, her lips painted bright red, and he's the one who disappears the moment you two start laughing.

I don't think it's completely on the mark to call Barry Hannah a 'comic' writer, though many do; to my way of thinking it's kind of a disservice to read him that way. And though Barry Hannah is no longer with us in the flesh, he's still the southern writer I'd most like to meet.