Boomerang

by Barry Hannah

The life of a Mississippi-born-and-bred boy brings struggles for a "tiny but sincere" child who comes of age amidst staggering lust, hatred, love, and mayhem and who has a pivotal meeting with an old man

Genres: Fiction, Southern

150 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1989

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

[Jason Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff from the late Barry Hannah from the literary haven of Oxford, Mississippi.

[Patrick Strickland · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some great sentences, some really interesting parts, but overall, this book's a series of Barry Hannah's worst hits.

[Ryan Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hannah tries to write his redemption in the same way he wrote his heart-afire destruction of years before. The results vary, and at its best, Boomerang is like other latter-day Hannah in that it's great in small chunks scattered throughout. Partially nonfiction, the tone is wonky despite clearly being Hannah's. Who knows how he felt about the truth at this time.

Regardless, Boomerang is Hannah at his tenderest but also his most sentimental. It would be another twenty years until he died, a fact he couldn't have known, certainly, but one he could perhaps sense. This book is as good a testament as any of a flawed man at the end of one struggle and the start of another.

[Lauren Bingham · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you love Barry Hannah, you'll enjoy this. It's mainly a series of stories about Barry's life that he wrote, I'm assuming, under the influence of alcohol and maybe paint thinner. Laugh out loud moments curtailed by somber truths is the best way to describe it.

[Jami · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew me away. I could have read so much more of what Hannah had to say about growing up in Mississippi. What a knockout of a book. Chapter by chapter, I was captivated. The voice in this in unmatched in my opinion. WOW!

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

a dazzling, glorious, mess of a book...I loved it!

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Multi-layered meta-fiction...

[Shane F · Rating 3 out of 5]

omnibus hc with 'never die'

[Milt · Rating 2 out of 5]

treadread. Too much by half. Liked all his others. Tossed this gently so someone might catch it. Didn't want it to return. Can't throw a boomerang away anyway.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked the thematic structure of time as a boomerang, how we are always moving back and forth between past and present. As always with Hannah the prose was singular and compulsively readable. The book is written as a series of improvisational jazz riffs. Hannah has fun mocking his own reputation. Given all that, the book seems less well-considered than some of his other stuff, a bit more flung together. I like the jumbling of fact and fiction; gives the whole thing more verisimilitude. Lots of names thrown in, which may be part of the point, but it causes a blurring of focus.