Hey Jack!

by Barry Hannah

A Southerner odyssey revolving around Gramps, a hypochondriacal professor, a rock star, redneck Southerners, Korean veterans, and Jack, an old cafe owner whose friendship with Homer, the narrator, anchors the story

Genres: Fiction, Southern, Literature

144 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 1988

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

[Tony Vacation · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hannah riffs and riffs and then, by God, he riffs some more on his familiar themes (madness, racism, functional alcoholism, pretty good music, infidelity, wartime blues, getting fucking old, redneck violence and airplanes) and tries to pass it off as a novel-lite. Diet novel? Novel zero? Tab? Anywho, worth the brief trade of your time if you are a fan of southern-fried stylings and the fairly frequent surprise of a sentence like some greasy wonder taking wing off the page.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barry Hannah wasn't a conventional writer. He pushed the envelope on what was funny and how far someone was willing to not take themselves seriously. With this being my 2nd excursion into his ridiculous world, I found it to be more easy to follow than Never Die, but still rather dreamy; you don't really know if what Homer, the Korean war veteran and narrator, says is entirely real or a figment of his imagination in relation to the characters around him.

Underneath all the quirkiness, there's true sadness here. Gramps and Double Gramps are the types of people in the small-town South that have never left their own personal bubble and can't fathom ever doing it - living their lives monotonously away from the fast hubbub of the big cities. To call them ignorant to the world is an understatement, but this is their milieu, their lives.

Within these pages people breathe the humid, stagnant Mississippi air, treat each other like dogs, play golf on a course known to be a shooting range and live their unfulfilled, monotonous existence.

'Hey Jack!' isn't necessarily memorable or bad, just entertaining for a quick read on a Sunday night before the workweek starts. It gets you ready for the week ahead knowing your life isn't as bad as you think it could be.

[Rob Maynard · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think I waited too long to read Barry Hannah. When I was a college student at UGA in the early eighties, every Southern Lit aficionado I knew worshipped Hannah. Only recently I checked out a book of his from the library, on a lark after reading the Oxford Review's issue dedicated to him. Hannah is lionized by generations of writers and writing students, and I get it that he is one of those anti-authoritarian types, whose indulgent lifestyle and whacked out characters created a meld of man and literature that I wasn't entirely immune to as a younger man. I idolized Hunter S. Thompson for years without considering the amount of human wreckage and unpleasantness that surrounded the man. He gave me great pleasure to read and served as an anti-role model for me when I was younger.

Maybe I'm older now, but Hannah's main tropes in this short novel(all of his novels are short)--smoking, drinking, shooting, fucking, riding motorcycles--all seem to come from such a wide yaw of personal male inadequacy that I don't end up caring for his characters, or finding them believable, either. No doubt it's true that oral and sexual fixations are alive in all men to one degree or another. I doubt that Barry Hannah loved his cigarettes more than I love a Krispy Kreme donut, for instance. But once you strip those obsessions away from the story, there's just not that much there, other than an unbelievable series of quirky events going on in the small Mississippi University town in which the main character lives.

He writes about a rock and roll star but not plausibly. The titular character Jack is an aging man with a preposterous backstory that is obviously the man Hannah wishes he was, as opposed to the narrator who is the man Hannah was when he wrote the book.

I'm going to dig a little deeper into Barry Hannah to see if I just picked up a lemon with Hey Jack! He's too well regarded as a canonical modern Southern Writer for me to give up after this effort. But I'll go into his next book a little skeptical. At least he gets to the heart of Southern male obsessions in fewer words than the gassy William Faulkner.

[Gary Sites · Rating 3 out of 5]

I grew up in the South when it was still the South, so this book resonated with me. I don't think it would have a wide a appeal though. I like Hannah's writing. It's unique, which is one of its main selling points for me. Kind of reminds me of a toned-down Harry Crews.

[Doc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a wild ride in Southern Gothic.

[Sophie Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

nooky

[Billycongo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really dislike this book. It just didn't make much of an impact on me. It was like a dream in that the information goes in, but it doesn't stick. If you asked me what it was about, I probably couldn't tell you. I can tell you some of the things that happened, plot-wise. It was funny. The problem is that things would happen and then they didn't happen. I kept wincing at the racial epithets. It may be realistic, but I just don't want to read those words.

I read 'Airships' and liked it. I will try another Barry Hannah book.

[Bill Householder · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good, but somewhat derivative book, very similar to Ray except for being primarily in the first person and being stories told about others, less about the narrator/protagonist. Still, a lot like Ray in many ways: characters, situations, etc. But you get into Hannah for his language and story be damned. This was a fun ride, not as fun as the first time and too much like its predecessor, but enjoyable nonetheless.

[Lauren Bingham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure southern gothic, darkly funny and swift.

[Tyler Malone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moderately enjoyable, just not as lasting as his other fiction. The further away readers venture from Hannah's staple works, the more we all wish he had lived longer, I think.

[John Molina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant sentences.