Ray by Hannah, Barry (1994) Paperback

by Barry Hannah

Nominated for the American Book Award, 'Ray' is the bizarre, hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the edge. Dr. Ray- a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband- is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Southern, Novella, Novels, American, Southern Gothic

Paperback

First published October 12, 1980

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ray is a jazzy tale. It is a rock and roll of a story.
There are so many ways to live your life. And there are so many ways not to live your life. Ray is a manual of the ways not to live your life but paradoxically they are our favourite ways of living.

Ray is thirty-three and he was born of decent religious parents, I say.
Ray, I didn’t ever think it would get to this. The woman I love and that I used to meet in the old condemned theater and we would wander around looking at the posters and worshiping the past, I just called her Sister like her parents, the Hooches, did.

Life is a civil war… Life is a tropical storm… Life goes on…

There ain’t nobody here and the fog is rolling around. For a moment I’m entering a zone of Edgar Allan Poe privacy. The border of vague in a semi-German or Greek swamp. Rising sins from my past are coming up and haunting my insides, and there’s this miserable dew on my buckle loafers. Look here, I’m an important doctor on a mission, I don’t have to wait here for creepy phantom business.

Life goes on…

Coming back from the convention in Omaha, I was thinking about my first wife. Because you have to be honest. You are packed with your past and there is no future.

Life goes on…

I pass by the mirror and see I’m still semihandsome. But you can never trust your own way of seeing.

Life goes on… But is the end of the line in sight already?

[Adam Dalva · Rating 3 out of 5]

"At the office there were a number of people in line. I went over to the back window and looked out over the creek, then down to it and the slick granite rocks through which it rushed. Who was it said we were invented by water as a means of its getting itself from one place to the other?"

This novella is one of the best-written things I have ever read - there's nothing better, in a way:

"Pick the football up, travel rearward on your legs, the way is clear, there is your receiver, arms up in the lights on the green field. The football leaves your arm like a quail. He's got it. Runs into the last green zone."

Just look at this astonishing introduction to our lead:

"Ray, you are a doctor and you are in a hospital in Mobile, except now you are a patient but you're still me. Say what? You say you want to know who I am?
I have a boat on the water. I have magnificent children. I have a wife who turns her beauty on and off like a light switch."

And yet - this pushes the limits of my usual desire to privilege language over content. I love Hannah's short stories for his quality of prose and place-setting, but as RAY stretched on, some of his negative quirks began to weigh on me. The lead's worshipful yet thoroughly shitty treatment of women, intentional fracture, and worst, the frequent, frequent use of racial slurs were difficult to overlook. I know the argument that these slurs are in character, and Hannah is smart enough to never have Ray think anything bad about a P.O.C., but in a way the fact that he knows better made it much more irksome. I know this book was written in 1980. But then again this book was written in 1980. I tend to like unlikable narrators, but I thought the hateful aspect of this one was an authorial misstep.

This is a review I've struggled with. I'm aware that it is likely going to be toward the top of the RAY page on Goodreads for the next stretch of time. Normally that sort of thing doesn't bother me, but a mixed review does not represent the achievement here, the beauty of Hannah. He is a master, and not just of the line. This is an iceberg book, with much happening beneath the surface, and the plot shines whenever its contours come into light. The lead is an excellent creation, the use of exclamation points is welcome, and the span of time it covers in 115 pages is unusual and instructive. But there's a nastiness here that for me, right now, was tough to get past. If you don't think it would bother you, by all means track this down. Just know that it's coming.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanna have fun? Next time a friend asks for a book recommendation whip this short little piece out (Freudianism intended) and watch the looks you get in the next few days. It's going to go one of two ways......either one could be interesting!

When I was a kid, I spent a little time in a horse barn with an old marine type who trained horses. Except he never trained, he just saddled and unsaddled them for kids like me to ride for him. We all did so because while it wasn't our turn, we sat on milk crates and listened to him tell stories about the war, sex with all types of women, fights he won, and all sorts of lewdness we shouldn't have been yet exposed to. He would coach us about how to live the same life ourselves. None of us had the balls to do what he said, but we damn sure enjoyed the lesson.

This book is about him. Except "he" is a washed out fighter pilot turned functioning alcoholic doctor that has an appetite for women of all kinds. It's rank with escapades involving sex (mostly), drinking, bodily harm, and abuses of all manner. He's a train wreck. He's a wanna be poet, he's pretty much a loaded pistol intent on popping off about any chance he gets. Oh yeah he also has lucid dreams and visions of being in the trenches with Confederate generals of days gone by.......pretty much his guiding light.

It is written wonderfully well. You're convinced the author speaks from first hand even though it's told in third person. How could anyone be friends with this guy or this author? Yet you are drawn to both. Not fully my cup of tea, although the dude accomplished what he sat out to do. It's just that in real life, that's not what I hope to do.

[Lizz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.

This was my first excursion into the mind of Barry Hannah. He somehow slipped under my radar. If I had to make a comparison I’d say that it was like William S. Burroughs, Barry Gifford and Richard Brautigan were mixed into a delicious strawberry smoothie.

“Even I don’t expect me. If I could happen, anything could.”

“Who was it said we were invented by water as a means of its getting itself from one place to the other?”

“It was either them or me, by God. I loved those clean choices.”

[John Pistelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know Hannah is a beloved figure (lavish blurbs on this edition from Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Alfred Kazin, James Dickey), but this doesn't do anything for me. Ray a miscellany of edgy zaniness that we're apparently supposed to accept quite soberly as a literary correlate of "the American confusion." Narrated Beckett-style from a hospital bed by Dr. Ray of Tuscaloosa after he has some kind of alcoholic crack-up, it meanders through tales of the town's eccentrics and through Ray's memories of Vietnam and the Civil War ("I live in so many centuries. Everybody is still alive."). There are some nice lyrical passages, mainly about the beautiful women Ray has loved, and some of the theater-of-the-absurd stuff is funny when it isn't trying too hard to shock with racial slurs and punny sex farce ("Afterward I ate her slowly. I hadn't eaten much all day."). Anyway, the elephant in the room here is Gordon Lish, who apparently edited the hell out of the book, to Hannah's satisfaction according to this researcher. The text is full of Lishey sentences and paragraphs that allow themselves to be led down cul-de-sacs by their own sounds and rhythms:

She ate me, just like another delicious thing on her menu. I felt rotten, cool, and unfaithful, yet I came with an enormous lashing of sperm, which made her writhe and lick.

(This one jumped out at me because "writhe and lick" recalls a passage in friend-of-Lish DeLillo in which a woman's breasts "jump and hum," a phrase James Wood made righteous fun of back in the day.)

None of this would bother me if Lish/Hannah didn't expect me to take it all as a serious statement on America and how violent and crazy it is. Not that America isn't, necessarily--I follow the news!--but a novel has to earn its themes not just gesture toward them in a way that flatters the right-thinking audience. Zany, vulgar comedy can be its own reward, and I would have accepted this as a distant ancestor of Family Guy; considered as a sociopolitical novel, though, it just doesn't exist. Why, you ask, would I even want to consider it as a sociopolitical novel? Probably because of the obviously Lish-authored and just-this-side-of-meaningless jacket copy on the first-edition hardcover I have out of the library:

The case for Ray is the case for the dogged citizen, the last warrior in the American epoch. He is the fool in flight from the safety of falling out of time and away from complication. He is, instead, the intrepid witness, willfully and disastrously present for the felonious spectacle of family, community, and nation.

Notice the unworkable combination of a sentence constructed out of its own echoing parts--all the consonance and assonance, words chosen primarily for sound and shape--with a grandiose thesis statement. This kind of writing is all over the book, and it just doesn't work. It represents the neo-classicalizing of modernism. Yes, Faulkner, Woolf, and Lawrence wrote sentences that had the inevitability and solidity of poetry, but they did so not for the sheer hell of it but rather under the pressure of their themes, to which they abandoned themselves totally, whereas this novel reads like a collection of carefully-constructed sentences in search of a theme, sliding from nihilistic farce to outright sentimentality without modulation. And the sentimentality is the most convincing part! Hannah seems, like Carver, to have been a kind of instinctive if disappointed humanist, somebody who might have gone in a more Dreiserian direction if Captain Fiction hadn't intervened (this is in contrast to somebody like DeLillo, whose stylizations feel holistic, the emanation of a genuine worldview, not something imposed from above).

To end on a more positive note, I liked this passage; it has a quietness in it that more of the novel could have been built on, instead of pursuing Civil War fantasies and tall tales from Southern living, so I'll end here:

I'm dreaming of the day when the Big C will be blown away. I'm dreaming of a world where men and women have stopped the war and where we will stroll as naked as excellent couples under the eye of the sweet Lord again. I'm dreaming of the children whom I have hurt from being hurt and the hurt they learn, the cynicism, the precocious wit, the poo-poo, the slanted mouth, the supercilious eyebrow.

Then I wake up and I'm smiling. Westy asks me what's wrong.

"Christ, darling, I just had a good dream, is all."

"I'll bet it was some patient you screwed. You rotten bastard."

She hits me over the head with a pillow.

Violence.

Some days, even a cup of coffee is violence.

When I can find my peace, I take a ladder to the hot attic and get out the whole plays of Shakespeare.

Okay, old boy. Let's hear it again. Sweat's popping out of my eyes, forehead.

Let's hear it again. Between the lines I'm looking for the cure for cancer.

[Aloha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this after reading Samuel Beckett and Roberto Bolaño. The similarities to Bolaño were that it contained many short chapters of musings, and was from a male point of view with machismo and objectifying women as objects of forking. There the similarities end. The whole Ray book can fit inside a Bolaño essay. When I’m bored with a book, I open my eyes really wide and take snap shots of a page, quick snapshots after snapshots to get it over with.

[~:The N:~ · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange and pointless book.
I didn't like the character and the story was confusing, but I found myself compelled to read on. But in the end, no matter how talented the writer is, the book can't save itself.

☆☆½

[Kristin Fouquet · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the spring of 1990, a friend suggested if I liked J.D. Salinger, I should read Raymond Carver. It would seem this recommendation and my subsequent falling in love with Carver’s style would come a bit too late. My “discovery” of him came two years after his death. I read everything by Carver I could find. I even turned down plans with friends to stay home and read his stories.

Years later, the controversy of Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish, became public and many voiced their thoughts on the process of such heavy editing of a writer’s work. I felt strangely betrayed. I wondered if I had read more Lish than Carver in all those stories. Yet, when I read what Tess Gallagher gave to The New Yorker as the first draft of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” which Carver had titled “Beginners,” I could honestly say the story was better for the editing. I also found it intriguing an editor would suggest a longer title.

In 2009, it was because of this controversy I met my future editor and publisher, Carter Monroe. A question was raised about it on a writer’s board and I asked him how he felt about it. After many in-depth discussions on the editing of Carver by Lish and the nature of editing in general, we began our own process. I’m grateful for everything I’ve learned and continue to learn about writing.

So this year when Carter said I needed to read Ray by Barry Hannah, I listened. I found it interesting Hannah had also worked with Gordon Lish. While reading Ray, a part of me wondered if Lish had done heavy editing on the short novel. Perhaps we’ll never know, but my feeling is the voice in Ray is so strong and surprising- like a whirling dervish spinning you into unsuspected territory- it must be authentic.

The narrator, Dr. Ray, takes us through a journey of experiences and relationships in a succinct whirlwind of a lifetime in 128 pages. Hannah finds the comedy and tragedy of our humanity and unabashedly reveals it with a delivery of hope. While it is a perfect and complete work, it has us asking for more time, much like life itself.

As with Carver, it seems I am once again “finding” an author two years after his demise. Although Carver and Hannah are no longer with us, their body of work is eternal.

© 2012 Kristin Fouquet

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing, which is dazzling, gets five stars, maybe six. But... I'm loath to moralize about art, but Hannah's evident romance with his run-down, tough-guy, jet-pilot-Nam-vet, dreaming-of-JEB Stuart narrator and his despite-all-the-thanatism-alcoholism-casual-misongyny-and-racism-I'm-still-a-charming-fucker,-ain't-I? self-regard sticks in my craw, even as it goads me into about 36 hours of put-on swagger. This might have been easier to take when Burt Reynolds still smoldered and it will be easier to take in 2020, when we'll be able to forgive our fathers their barbarities, but I think at this particular moment in history this shit remains a little too close not to leave a bad aftertaste.

[Elliot · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't understand how this book has a nearly four star average. I don't understand it at all. It's a random and jumbled-up collection of tiny bits of stories and anecdotes that are neither interesting nor entertaining, in fact far more of them are just pointless or even offensively stupid. Perhaps I should have read some of the reviews before deciding to read this book, they're glowing but in a way that I would have known that I'd hate the book.

At least it was mercifully short, taking perhaps an hour or an hour and a half to read. I knew by page six that I didn't like the book, but it has such good reviews and comes so highly recommended by many literary sources that I trudged on. I want my time back.

[Shappi · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow, I'd never read Barry Hannah before and have just fallen in love with him. I think it's because almost every line is completely unexpected--i'm a sucker for that. But overall the writing is just incredibly sharp. However, I can't be responsible for reactions to the actual content of the book. the guy's clearly a racist and misogynist up the wazoo.

[Charles White · Rating 5 out of 5]

holy and perfect.

[Bud Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best books I've ever read.

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing beats this man's style: the syntax that makes your brain crawl.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful short novel defies any preconcepcion you may have about a 'novel' and reminds me more of a protest song.
It will mean different things to different people, but for me, it is the scenario of an intelligent professional dealing with mental stress after war; a doctor, family man, alcoholic; trying to balance children, lovers, patients and neighbors in the sweat of Alabama at the end of Carter’s years of presidency, and, this is the key, remain sane. Blended into this are Ray's hallucinatory fantasies of shooting down planes in Vietnam or killing Yankees in the Civil War.
I'd read the odd review of this previously and thought how could that possibly work and be readable, especially in little over a hundred pages, but the writing is such that it will infuse itself into you, and infection will soon follow.
Despite this, Ray is a pretty unlikeable character; misogynist, racist, drinking heavily before surgeries. I am not only amazed at how Hannah makes all this gel, but also how in the end of what isn't a plot driven novel, you end up cheering that Ray survives.
This is a challenging and funny novel that shatters literary convention. Though at times it made me think of Bukowski, that is an unfair comparison, as it is radically original.

[Erik Evenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is a scene from Ray:
Westy comes in. She's disturbed.
"Are you drinking, Ray?"
"No. Get me a drink."

Here's another scene:
She hits me over the head with a pillow.
Violence.
Some days even a cup of coffee is violence.
When I can find my peace, I take a ladder to the hot attic and get out the whole plays of Shakespeare.
Okay, old boy. Let's hear it again. Between the lines I'm looking for the cure for cancer.

and the kicker:
Ken, my nephew, once asked me as we were going to sleep after some snapper fishing in Destin, Florida: "Promise me something, Uncle Ray?"
"What?"
"That when I die I won't be from Ohio."

Oh, wait. You want a review? Ok. Ray is one of those books where the line reigns supreme. Take the way Nabakov can't say anything ordinary, throw in some Kurt Vonnegut disregard of rules and deep fat fry the whole thing and you'll have Ray, a book about a doctor from Tuscaloosa who is happy, sad, moral, unethical, chaste, promiscuous and hates all doctors. There's some bits about fighting in all of the U.S. wars, too. Read the lines. This stuff is Poetry with a plot (loose plot).

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Ray," a slender early novel by the Mississippi writer Barry Hannah, is the first person account of an alcoholic/drug addicted/physician/former fighter pilot who, in his own words, "lives near the Black Warrior River and has an enormous sex engine." His love of the Hooches, particularly Sister Hooch, richly erotic singer and her morphine addicted poet father, Papa Hooch, runs like mainlined junk through the story of a man who's lived so many lives in so many different times.

This novel is unique in modern American literature and, along with Hannah's short story collection, "Airships," is the best Hannah has ever written.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I have read this year.

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the 4th from hannah for me and i think it is by far his best.

i read a review or two three that mention...that word, it means "hatred of women" i don't even know how to spell the fucking word, much less pronounce it, but it's been a part of my world since i went to college. like the word "pink". i could say ray is "pink" and it would mean exactly the same fucking thing. nothing. wait now, "pink" says more because it denotes a color, whereas "misogyny" as it is used means nothing until the reviewer delights and instructs one and all by citing a for example. that was lacking in the reviews i read. i grow weary of the labels people throw around like rolls of toilet paper, signifying nothing, until such time that they provide a reason for the papering of the tree.

does anyone, and i mean, ANYONE, know what the word for "hatred of men" is? what i'm getting at is that this is another case of "show me, don't tell me" regards any "hatred of women" in hannah's story. what i think happens is that the fashionable ideology, so prevalent in the colleges, where the freedom of speech is easily abrogated and shackled, has led to this lazy and overuse of the word, misogyny....whew...there we go. got this "spell check" on the system.

okay...win the kewpee doll and give me the word for "hatred of men".

can't do it, can you? but the other is and has been drilled into us ad infinitum since the days of yore.

i dunno, i'd hazard that ray has a taste for women. read the book. tell me i'm wrong.

it is now a favorite of mine. great story.

[Krok Zero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sabers, gentlemen, sabers!

Someday Barry Hannah will get his due as one of the greatest American writers. Sure, all his books have been critically acclaimed and he enjoys a healthy cult following, but this man deserves to be a household name. His books should be taught in schools, his name should be whispered in tones of mythic reverence. "Ray" is a concentrated blast of what makes Barry Hannah unique and wonderful, 113 slim pages of distilled genius. You will not forget it. And if you happen to live in Ohio...sorry.

BUMPED 03/01/10 -- Barry Hannah has just died. I've only read this novel plus his short story collection Airships, but both are absolutely essential. Hannah was an incredible writer, one of the best prose stylists I have read, incapable of writing a dull sentence. His sentences transcend his prosaic medium and become something unnamable, unpredictable, utterly beautiful. Read this book, and anything else by Hannah you can get your hands on. At 67, he's left us too soon.

[Yourfriendthefool · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Nether. That’s a good one. Hang on to a word like nether.
Her nether hoot. No I don’t, nether. This is the netherlands and it will nether get worse. That is the awfulest netherest laughter.
I just threw up my netherest soul. There’s nothing left, nether. My eyes are full of yellow bricks. There are dry tiny horses running in my veins."


He’s…it’s just…
Sometimes, it’s as if the sentences are charged by an electrical current, evenly humming while blue sparks arc from word to word, daring you to follow; and sometimes, instead of you following them forward, it’s as if they’re running behind you, chasing you through darkened streets of a city that’s devoid of life or sound, like his words are a feral pack of hounds with muscles surging underneath their fur as they come ever closer to the rubber of your heels.

There’s an energy to his writing, is what I mean to say.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine Bukowski with an MFA, and having just read Slaughterhouse-Five. And being from the south. And having an (ir?)rational hatred of Ohio.

...which actually makes it sound like I enjoyed it more than I did. Eh. It had its moments.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weird little story about a sex-obsessed, ex-Navy pilot turned doctor, and I can't say that I got all of it, but I did like it. But I should warn potential readers with sensitive inclinations that Hannah will likley offend many. Didn't both me, though a few times I blanched. Why this was nominated for an ABW is a bit of a surprise, though no doubt its brazenness at the time might be one of the reasons. I felt like I was wandering around in Ray's drug (or alcohol)-induced memory. But many of his observations were pretty funny, and oddly enough I knew some men like him. And while the sexual and weird content didn't phase me much, I always have trouble with books that use the "N" word (and a few other objectionable ones), even when it fits in with dialogue of the time. So, be warned.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Raunchy, comic novel of a former Vietnam pilot in the 1970s South. All about the unique style, not the substance (which contains a lot of racism and vulgar descriptions of women and various sexual acts). Sample prose:

"I have a boat on the water. I have magnificent children. I have a wife who turns her beauty on and off like a light switch...I just threw up my netherest soul. There’s nothing left, nether. My eyes are full of yellow bricks. There are dry tiny horses running in my veins.

That was three weeks ago, Ray. Now I am clean. My head is full of light. I am a practicing doctor again and it is necessary I go over to the Hooches. My heart, my desire. Sister!"

[Gideonleek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ray just like me

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doctor ray is a womanizer, a small town drunk, vigilante, poet and adoring husband.
The author presents this very hyper character who goes after anything he likes in a dress, while being married, he does it all in theses pages so expect some talk of the sexual nature coupled with his bizarre outlook and humor to life. Ray lives life wildly and to the edge and he's having swell of a time doing it. The story was written some nice little sentences with some great dialogue. I found this to be good old straight and simple storytelling. A fun read that did not present great literary content but a story with a memorable character of no-nonsense characteristics a hedonist with plenty of love is Ray one whom i will surely not forget.
Be prepared to be delighted, provoked, shocked and amused by a writer that probably has not had enough praise by the book world.

Also @ http://more2read.com/review/ray-by-barry-hannah/

[Melody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barry Hannah's nephew told my husband that he had tried briefly living with Uncle Barry. He said he never used a cliché, always had something interesting to say, but his rants started to scare him. That's just how I felt about the book. My, my, he can turn a phrase - but what the hell is he talking about?
Barry Hannah was the uncle of my husband's college roommate. That fact, the poetic phrases, and the familiar landmarks mentioned in the "story" (the term I shall use lightly) made the book a likeable one. But I can't go further than that. I just found myself feeling like the book was written during a fog of alcohol poison and I wanted to give the women the number of a domestic abuse counselor.

[Judi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howl! This transcends the term "a novel" or merely brilliant writing. Ray is pure art . . . a mosaic, a collage. Never experienced a comparable book. For me, it is bitter, sharp edged, moving, vulgar, painful, heroic, loyal, red, visceral, southern, soft, grey, delicate . . . . It is all that art could ever hope to convey and each "reader" will come away with a different experience. For example, I didn't see the humor tucked into this work. Others have. My perspective is impacted, I'm certain, as I am a contemporary of "Ray". The visceral aspects of that time still have the power to jab my memory. This art and artist stands alone. "Sabers up!"

[Leif Quinlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go put on Sturgill Simpson’s “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music” and then try to explain to me exactly why that country record is so special and different from every other great country record you’ve heard and you’ll know what Makes Ray so unique. Hannah fits the whole professional lifetime of a man into 113 pages, somehow doing everything that Fight Club did for manhood and the revealing of the male psyche but in a more endearing and heroic way (which is not a denouncement of Fight Club). I never for a second turned on Ray no matter his behavior. This is a staggeringly good book – I loved it and plan multiple rereads

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The life and times of a racist, sexually promiscuous, substance abusing, Alabama physician and Vietnam veteran as related in stream of consciousness prose by the eponymous first person narrator. I love the prose, and the protagonist, while dislikable, is nonetheless authentic.