Sunday with Books: Airships
There are novels, and then there are novellas. There are novellas, and then there are short stories. There are short stories, and then there are vignettes. There are vignettes, and then there are Airships. These are the vessels in which the freewheeling imagination of Barry Hannah takes flight, sailing directly against the headwinds of boredom.
I am reminded of that old Hawaiian adage: don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes. The same logic applies to reading Airships. Each story is usually over in the same amount of time; it’s flash fiction for the southern gothic enthusiast. Just when you feel the wheels starting to move, someone’s spilled their moonshine, crashed their tractor, or tipped a cow, and the story is over.
These are portraits, not motion-pictures - brief, cartoonish depictions of life in the deep south, akin to the early works of Flannery O’Connor. At first glance, each character possesses the kind of levity and innocence you’d expect from a midcentury comic strip, and the language is florid, colorful, and inviting. But blink an eye and Hannah takes on a different form: the sentences grow cold and harden; the humor becomes perverse; and violence strikes like heat-lightning. — Jackson Todd
““Literature is the history of the soul.””
[cover photo: Elegy for Mossland, by Clarence John Laughlin]
