We must forgive Barry Hannah his inability to mention a woman without leering; we must forgive him his swaggering and name-dropping; we must forgive him because of his sentences.

In his latest, Boomerang, Hannah writes as sublimely and tersely as ever. He distills into hard little aphorisms the profound sound and fury of Southern oratory, the sensuous sermonizing of an entire people who've had a few slugs of whiskey and now want to hear their own voices saying scandalous truths about dying and fornicating and The War of Northern Aggression.

Who would think a Southerner could be so short-winded? "Pappy is like the Confederate Army. So awesome in his rudeness." "I was embarrassed by her, but we had a baby." "He had great muscles in his arms and in his legs that you only get in a penitentiary."

Hannah first grabbed wide attention 20 years ago on the pages of Esquire. Though his first novel, Geronimo Rex, won a PEN prize, perhaps most impressive is his novella Ray, about a doctor who disdains the Hippocratic oath and loans out his nurse for certain unorthodox cures. What gives this book its power is not just Hannah's bullet-like sentences, but also his frightening, funny portrayal of the brutal doctor who is fighting a civil war with his own soul.

Boomerang is similar in structure to Ray—the language is chopped into short chapters, like journal entries. What's different is that while Ray merely pretends to be a journal, Boomerang is Hannah's account of what it's like to be himself—a "tender weaving of novel and autobiography" according to the publisher. The book's intended scope is his entire life. He whizzes through his childhood, then jumps into the head of an uncle who presumably represents Hannah in old age. But mostly he gushes about his current glamorous doings; sometimes the book seems to be no more than a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with literary pretensions.

When Hannah employs his powerful fictional techniques, he's as fine as ever. For instance, he uses the central image as a reprise: The boomerang, or something like it, shows up at intervals to remind us what the book's about. Ostensibly, the boomerang is karma, what goes around and then comes around: "If you throw it well,… [it] almost comes back into your palm. Every good deed and every good word sails out into the hedges and over the grass and comes to sit in your front yard." At other times, Hannah uses the image to talk about the nature of self-destruction. He explains that when he was a kid, "there was a place where I could go with my own war. I would line up plastic soldiers against the door and shut it and then shoot my Daisy beebee gun against the door. The ricochets, coming right toward my face, were the enemy firing back."

However, in the more overtly autobiographical chapters, Hannah fails to show his life as a series of startling images or to send Boomerang soaring up on language; instead, he uses it as a blunt instrument to hammer us over the head with what a cool dude he is. Why, he's dear friends with Jimmy Buffet (I would keep that secret), Bob Altman, Jack Nicholson. He rides a motorcycle, packs a gun. And "Capote when he was really drunk called me the maddest writer in the USA."

He knows a lot of nobodies too and wants us to understand just how fiercely he loves them all. At times the book seems no more than a string of dedications, or a family Christmas card. "All my nephews and nieces are a blessing to me endlessly." "I owe thanks to my sister."

But for all his love, Hannah lacks compassion, which in autobiography comes off as tactlessness. One can tolerate almost any nonsense from a fictional character—boorishness reads as authorial irony. In Ray, when Hannah's good ol' boy doctor says, "I don't feel that good about women anyway, nor gooks, nor sand-niggers, nor doctors, nor anything human that moves," it hardly seems like the position of the author. But in Boomerang, when Hannah says as himself (or as a caricature of himself) that a limo parked in front of his house "makes the darkies at the ice house stretch their necks" or when he gloats, "I have had so much young nooky on my arm telling them about what a famous writer I am," the reader can only get embarrassed for him; darkie and nooky readers may often be tempted to throw the book across the room.

I've always thought that authors should be like good party guests: charming, but not too loquacious. If Hannah were at your party, he'd try desperately to get laid, bore everyone with his bragging, and drink himself into a coma. But even so, you'd grudgingly invite him back because, before passing out in the bathtub, he'd say something like,

The both of us have come back to this pretty and humane town to practice secular humanism as hard as we can. That is when we're just staring out of windows trying to see even the rough face of God in the clouds or in the vapor over the oil spots in the parking lot of the Jitney Jungle.