[Edwards is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he asserts that Hey Jack! pales in comparison to Hannah's earlier works.]

Since his first novel, Geronimo Rex, won the William Faulkner Prize and a National Book Award nomination in the early 1970's, Barry Hannah has been a leading contender for Southern novelist of his generation. Every generation seems to want a Southern novelist of its own; there was Faulkner himself, and then Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy and various other successors and claimants. But now there are not a lot of Southern novelists left. Regional writers are supposed to stay put, more or less, and over the last two or three decades Southern-born talent has tended to leave home, to search in Europe or New York or elsewhere for broader social and imaginative affiliations.

To his credit, Mr. Hannah has stayed put, and his later books, especially Airships and Ray, have added to his reputation. But in his new novella, Hey Jack!, geography, local culture, and a sense of his precursors—especially Faulkner—seem to be interfering with his performance.

Hey Jack! is set in Mississippi, in a small university town rather like Faulkner's Oxford, where Mr. Hannah now lives and works. Its governing subject, pursued through playful narrative indirections, is the isolation and erosion of intelligence and sensitivity by cultural barbarism, in the modern South and of course elsewhere too. The narrator's name is withheld until the last page, but it turns out to be Homer, and his "tales of our little town," centering on stolen loves and manly vengeance, do have modest epic possibilities.

Homer is in his mid-50's, a bookish writer manque, divorced and childless, devoted to the body—he's a drinker, a smoker, a tennis player—but psychically scarred by combat in Korea and a later episode of madness. The figures of his tales are various: a trashy local family that has spawned Ronnie Foot, a repellent rock star; a morose professor who set his books and records on fire and in the excitement perished when his car rolled back over him; a racist, McCarthyite dentist who, having lost his wife, his sons and his money, suffered a fatal heart attack when a malicious young black man tapped on his window in the night; Jack Lipsey, once a sheriff, a poet and a professor of criminal justice, who in his old age runs a coffee shop and worries about his daughter's carryings on with Ronnie Foot.

All these tales weave, gradually, into Homer's own story, but they also gravitate toward each other rather too neatly. There is a running association of intellect, sexual weakness or confusion, and despair. The professor and the dentist were both what Jack Lipsey sardonically calls "hermitsexuals," lonely, epicene men whose investment in knowledge fails to compensate for betrayal by life. (Homer is careful to report that the professor's head exploded when his car crushed him.) The tireless Ronnie Foot corrupts both the professor's daughter, a psychiatric counselor, and Jack Lipsey's daughter, a school teacher. And around the story's edges, creative mind is sinking fast, in the persons of another Korea veteran who's an unsuccessful painter, lives with his mother, advertises frantically for a wife, and spends much time in mental wards, and one of the dentist's effeminate sons, a failed sculptor who is last observed slashing the tires of the bread truck he's been reduced to driving.

Outside these enclaves of hopeless sensitivity, life has turned into a Burt Reynolds movie, an ambiance of truck stops, motorcycles and hot cars, guns and blood sports, boozing, sexual brutality and the Nashville Sound. Homer himself has a thoroughly mixed involvement in all this; his disdain for redneck machismo in others is clear ("people like young Harmon would better serve each other by going back up in the hills and committing incest man on man. Or having saw fights"), yet he himself is an alcohol and nicotine and Ritalin man, a biker and (in Korea) a killer, a moralist who can't resist sexual opportunity. And I would judge that Mr. Hannah shares in this ambivalence—a world of mindlessly aggressive pleasure is both mocked and in an odd way embraced by writing that seems determined never to be shocked into full sobriety by the horrors it keeps conjuring up.

The real enemies of the intelligent life, however, appear to be aging and death, the mere accumulation of experiences that comes with living in time. After a death-ridden denouement, Jack Lipsey exhaustedly remarks: "They gave you and me a certain hell, Homer…. They made us know everything," and Jack himself is the measure of what has gone wrong. He is a civil, neat, clean old man, temperate in his pleasures, hard to know but tolerant of human difference, quietly intelligent and feeling, with a physical grace—he's a fine golfer—that age hasn't ruined. Thrice divorced from wives he remained friendly with, he is, like Faulkner's aristocrats, vulnerable only to the insistences of honor and affection.

The South itself looks pretty bad in Hey Jack! Mr. Hannah's theory of the causes of the Civil War, for example, is not what you find in history books: "The Civil War was not started by Harriet Beecher Stowe, as Lincoln said, or Sir Walter Scott, as Mark Twain said, or by economics, as somebody said. It was started by about a thousand towns like this, bored out of their minds." Or, as he makes a young psychiatrist say, "In this state … I find there are exactly five subjects: money, Negroes, women, religion, and Elvis Presley."

But like Faulkner, who almost persuades us that Quentin Compson doesn't hate the South, Mr. Hannah almost convinces us that he doesn't hate it either. For Homer, place is metaphor, the means of discovering "the hungry dark beneath our bright and serene veneers." The trouble is not that this epiphany sounds too much like Faulkner, though it does, but that it doesn't comfortably mesh with Mr. Hannah's own way of doing things, his fondness for verbal and perspectival teases, his delight (with which I have no quarrel) in the raunchy hilarities he affects to deplore in his native scene, his "just kidding, folks" disclaimers of a moral seriousness he yet can't keep his hands off. His material and the present cast of his imagination seem increasingly at odds; it might be time for him to move, at least for a while.