Night-Watchmen

by Barry Hannah

Book by Hannah, Barry

232 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 1973

About the author

Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. He was the author of eight novels and five short story collections. He worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin. His work was published in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, and a host of American magazines and quarterlies. In his lifetime he was awarded the The Faulkner Prize (1972), The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction, The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award, the PEN/Malamud Award (2003) and the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of natural causes.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

read during my College Years

I Remember: murders on a college campus... submerged, murky narrative... oh so postmodern... college is stupid... bleak is funny... mid-life crisis is funny... education is funny... too many characters, i need to make a list... lots of great lines... who said that?... where is the mystery, where is the plot, oh come on, just give me some traditional narrative shape to cling to, anything really, i want to finish this but i'm getting frustrated... oh wait, remember this is postmodernism... slipping in and out of different perspectives... this is fun, actually no it's not - it's irritating, no it is fun, i am getting something out of this, i am, i am, wait what's happening, so confused.

[Krok Zero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impossible to "review" Barry Hannah, so please enjoy this glorious passage:

We tried to define bore, and found out how relative and personal the term was. For instance Magee, our African boarder, thinks the Gulf of Mexico out there is boring, and said he went across the highway to the beach in the dark of night just to piss in it. He thinks of the sea as a boring efficient sewage system. Bob Hill came in with a point that the sky was boring, often. Bryant made a bid that, among the arts, only literature was boring. Know what I did then? I had my pistol and I discharged it twice at the ceiling of the TV room, where we were. “But nobody that knows Didi can say she is boring!” I shouted. A dust of plaster was raining down on us. Everybody agreed that you weren’t boring. Trove, our young landlord, came in looking at the two craters in the ceiling. They looked like a brassiere seen from the angle of a woman about to put it on. Trove as much as told me I was boring, getting drunk and having a pistol and so on, and I’d have to quit these habits or room elsewhere. After the commotion was over, Weymouth, our British friend, asked us, “Do you know what is really boring, but I’ll kiss its soil and miss it so much I can’t sleep at night unless I’ve had a six-pack of what you call beer?” Nobody could guess. “England,” he said. “Merry old bloody boring England.” It brought tears to my eyes....And Didi, you bring tears to my eyes.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weirdly, I got this book out to read two days before Barry Hannah died. I used to call Hannah my favorite living writer. Now that he's dead, I think I'll still call him my favorite living writer so he doesn't have to compete with Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Nabokov and Joyce and Faulkner and Woolf and Tolstoy and Cervantes and Sterne and Elkin and on and on. Anyway, the writing's still alive, and always will be. This book, like his others, is full of sentences so strange and hilarious and sad and perfect that I find myself re-reading the same paragraphs ten or twelve times and probably wouldn't ever stop if there weren't more on the next page. That's probably too much hyperbole, but it's also true. This is such a pleasurable book to stay up late reading with a glass of whiskey. It's a real late-night book. I seem to recall reading an interview with Hannah where he called this the least of all his books, saying he wrote it too hurriedly and filled it with too many people, but I disagree. Set in southern Mississippi at a fictional university in the late 1960s, the novel is told from multiple perspectives but is mainly about an orphaned college dropout who inherits a small fortune from a dead aunt and blows it on a mansion on the beach. He becomes a landlord and rents the spare rooms to doctoral students. Meanwhile, someone is sneaking around campus at night knocking out graduate students and professors, and someone else, or maybe the same person, is murdering nightwatchmen. It's one of the most moving books about loneliness I've read, and it's one of the saddest and the funniest. It's also about Hurricane Camille, tennis, sex, shooting corpses, and driving cars into trees. It's also out of print, has never been released in paperback, and a used copy will set you back 70-150 bucks. Somebody put this book back in print.

[Andi Koral · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this one as much as I have his other works (although it finally started getting good toward the end). I thought maybe it was just me, but then I read in a few places that this is considered Hannah's weakest work. Made me feel better.

[Chad]

Out of print, difficult to find, and very expensive...unless you find it listed on eBay with the title misspelled! Neener, neener, nee-ner!

[Unky Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of print and very dear, when I was more gainfully employed I found a copy for less than 50 bucks. Worth every penny and then some.

[Bill Householder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overly long novel, doesn’t know if it’s a mystery or a satire of academic life, should’ve been shortened by 40 pages; it’s no wonder Hannah didn’t want it reprinted.