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Geronimo Rex
Geronimo Rex, Barry Hannah's brilliant first novel, which was nominated for the National Book Award, is full of the rare verve and flawless turns of phrase that have defined his status as an American master. Roiling with love and torment, lunacy and desire, hilarity and tenderness, Geronimo Rex is the bildungsroman of an unlikely hero. Reared in gloomy Dream of Pines, Louisiana, whose pines have long since yielded to paper mills, Harry Monroe is ready to take on the world. Inspired by the great Geronimo's heroic rampage through the Old West, Harry puts on knee boots and a scarf and voyages out into the swamp of adolescence in the South of the 1950s and '60s. Along the way he is attacked by an unruly peacock; discovers women, rock 'n' roll, and jazz; and stalks a pervert white supremacist who fancies himself the next Henry Miller.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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1629 people want to read
About the author
Barry Hannah
52 books280 followersBarry 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.
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October 30, 2024
Geronimo Rex is a novel of youth… And the title of the book is an ironic allusion to Oedipus Rex
The mid-fifties of the last century… A curious time… Subcultures of beatniks and greasers…
The rock-and-roll era has just moved in… The narrator is adolescent and full of pep…
Time crawls on… All his dreams are about girls… Dreams incredible and childishly naive… He also wishes to play the trumpet… And in this he is more successful than with girls…
In summer he goes to New York to learn more trumpet… The place isn’t a paradise…
But everything is much better than it seemed to be at first… When he returns home and goes back to school he wins some popularity…
Now it’s 1960… Our young hero is eighteen… And he departs for college…
He befriends his weird roommate… Thick as thieves… So they become two unstrung oddballs in action… He enters the medical school but fails… And his secret hero is Geronimo…
In our youth we all need heroes to worship and some of our heroes are the really strange ones.
The mid-fifties of the last century… A curious time… Subcultures of beatniks and greasers…
The rock-and-roll era has just moved in… The narrator is adolescent and full of pep…
I owned a black Chevy station wagon with a big console speaker for bringing in such cats as Elvis, Mickey and Sylvia, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, fixed in a pecan frame behind the second seat My radio, with this speaker, brought in these singers like they were alive and struggling in the back of the car.
Time crawls on… All his dreams are about girls… Dreams incredible and childishly naive… He also wishes to play the trumpet… And in this he is more successful than with girls…
I needed no phonograph music. The sound of myself on trumpet was good enough. I loved that trumpet. I wanted one of my own.
In summer he goes to New York to learn more trumpet… The place isn’t a paradise…
The brownstone apartments were stuck together with the spit of old, crazy men. The ache of my backbone and thigh taught me there was no happiness in this place.
But everything is much better than it seemed to be at first… When he returns home and goes back to school he wins some popularity…
Now it’s 1960… Our young hero is eighteen… And he departs for college…
I felt very precious in the oily leather seat; I was a pistol leaking music out its holster. My horn was in the well behind my seat. I had an intense suntan and scorched hair. There were California license plates on the T-bird which I hadn’t bothered to remove: Malibu Harry. It was all right if boys and girls thought that about me. Sneering, using the car radio music as my own accompaniment, I thought I was quite a piece of meat.
He befriends his weird roommate… Thick as thieves… So they become two unstrung oddballs in action… He enters the medical school but fails… And his secret hero is Geronimo…
This wasn’t petty, this Indian, Apache. I knew that. Oh, I knew that at the last he joined the Dutch Reformed church, grew watermelons, and peddled the bows and arrows that he made. But at the very last, he’d been kicked out of the church for gambling, he’d had six wives, and died of falling off a wagon, drunk, in his eighties.
In our youth we all need heroes to worship and some of our heroes are the really strange ones.
February 9, 2017
***This is a mature review not for the kiddos.***
“I knew she was too much woman for me, for one thing, and for another, no man could look on her without becoming a slobbering kind of rutting boar; she did not enchant you: she put you in heat.”
Now, really, truth be known any woman is too much woman for Harry Monroe. He grew up in Dream of Pines, Louisiana and decided to go to school at Hedermansever College in Mississippi mainly because the acceptance letters from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Juilliard, somehow, never arrived. Hedermansever is a school where 30% of the students are studying theology. By this time I know Harry well enough to know that this college may not be the best fit for him. Monroe tried his hand at a number of things including pre-med and pharmacology, but finally settled on English because it was about the only thing that got him stirred up enough to actually retain something about what he was learning.
He was reading ”doubtful Christians like Joyce Cary, Aldous Huxley, and William Faulkner. You couldn’t get Henry Miller in Mississippi then, with which one masturbates feeling like an intellectual snob.”
Monroe is fixated on Geronimo and convinces himself that he is a reincarnated, pale faced version of that Apache killer. He starts carrying a gun and wearing a reptilian, long coat. He meets Patsy or Patsy meets him. She is enamored with a version of himself that doesn’t exist. He doesn’t really like her all that much, but decides that given the current state of affairs she might actually be persuaded to sleep with him.
It does not go well.
Monroe has recently blossomed and when he looks in the mirror he sees the vestiges of the handsome man he will become. During the foreplay part Patsy just keeps calling him ugly, which shatters his fragile self-esteem, and then she sees his:
”My Lord, it looks like you’ve been wounded! Something they rammed through from behind….”
Okay, Barry Hannah you got me there. I laughed out loud. Poor, poor Monroe.
He has a roommate, not one he chose, not really one that anyone would choose. The self-proclaimed genius Bobby Dove Fleece who barely functions on a normal day and is generally down with some form of swamp flu or malaise from too much contact with the human race. He is not a stabilizing influence in Monroe’s life nor does he have much more luck with women.
”He disdained the female for the reason that none of the was a goddess with whom he could fall hopelessly in love. He jerked the tops of a few letters out of his satchel. ‘Oh Catherine, Catherine, you are my naked breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well do I gain again that day, noon, as the language of your body aroused you helplessly to climb upon the table from which I was eating, open your robe, and lie back supine, your thighs begging me to perpetuate the holiday of love with you…. Oh my lost sperm in you, oh happy, happy spewing away of ambition and power.’”
Oh, Bobby Dove, women just don’t deserve you...really they don’t.
Monroe plays the trumpet. Music, from what I read, is a theme in most of Hannah’s writing. He certainly shows reverence in this book when Monroe gets a chance with a makeshift band to play a tune in a “colored club”.
”Coming in tight, I hit the flatted seventh of what I meant to hit, way up there, and came back down in a baroque finesse such as I’d never heard from myself, jabbing, bright, playing the pants off Sweet Georgia, causing them to flutter in the beer and bacon smoke of the place. Silas began the dip-thrums and I unified with him while Joe locked the gates on the measures, back-busting that beautiful storm of hides and cymbals. Harry had found it and he began screaming with glee through that horn, every note the unlocked treasure of his soul--and things he had never had, yes, he hit an F above high C! What a bop the three of us were raising in there, what a debut, what a miracle. My horn pulsed fat and skinny. Oh, Harry was stinging them, but stinging them mellow. “
Now... that... is a writer that understand music on a whole new level. I can feel music like that, but I can’t write about music like that. As Bobby Dove says when Monroe pisses him off just go suck your trumpet Mr. Hannah.
This book is set in the 1960s in the South. Barry Hannah does not know a word that he is unafraid to use. He uses words long deemed unacceptable when addresses people of color. He uses them so much, that I thought I would eventually reach a saturation point where the words would no longer resonate with me, but they proved as squirm worthy at the end of the book as they do at the beginning of the book.
I hear teenage girls referring to each other, as terms of endearment, with words that I’d been taught a long time ago not to call a woman even if she did deserve it. I hear black men calling other black men names that would give them cause to beat me down, deservedly so, if I referred to them in such a manner. I guess my thought is that if I don’t want other people using certain language towards me then I should not use those words when referring to myself or my friends. Some words just need to be eradicated, like polio.
Monroe falls in love with this girl named Catherine. He knows so little about her that he can build these fabrications about her in his own mind that make her a woman of gossamer and stars. She is living with her Uncle, who is a white supremacist peripherally connected to the murder of Medgar Evars. That doesn’t bother Monroe as much as his paranoid belief that this Uncle has perverted designs on his own niece. This all culminates in a series of comical gun battles between her Uncle and the duo of Bobby Dove and Harry Monroe. They are a demented, inept version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
If you are having difficulties wooing a girl, shoot her uncle.
I don’t know how inebriated Hannah was while he was writing this novel, but parts of it read like a man pontificating about fantasy laden adventures with pieces of those stories floating in a lake of booze and connecting up randomly with other pieces of other stories. Images float out of the haze that left distinct impressions on me.
”She had a way of leaning on the door, a way of being small and brown with her jumbled black hair; her eyes were dull and smoky, and she sighed out the smell of a bruised flower.”
Or this tight, yet full fleshed, description of his neighbor.
”He was near eighty and looked like a dwarf who had started as normal but had been ridden into old age by some terrible concern astride his neck.”
I’ve never read Hannah’s short stories, but I hear that is where he really shines. This novel has some real humor, some moments of dark Southern traditional writing, some moments of beautiful clarity, but it is weighed down by too much muddy Mississippi water. Despite saying that there are scenes in this novel that I will never forget. He takes a few pot shots at William Faulkner and Henry James by complaining that those writers occasionally (well, ok, more than that) write sentences that require a reader to read them more than once to understand them. I forgive him because more than likely he was seeing double when he was trying to read those venerated writers anyway.
***3.5 stars out of 5***
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
“I knew she was too much woman for me, for one thing, and for another, no man could look on her without becoming a slobbering kind of rutting boar; she did not enchant you: she put you in heat.”
Now, really, truth be known any woman is too much woman for Harry Monroe. He grew up in Dream of Pines, Louisiana and decided to go to school at Hedermansever College in Mississippi mainly because the acceptance letters from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Juilliard, somehow, never arrived. Hedermansever is a school where 30% of the students are studying theology. By this time I know Harry well enough to know that this college may not be the best fit for him. Monroe tried his hand at a number of things including pre-med and pharmacology, but finally settled on English because it was about the only thing that got him stirred up enough to actually retain something about what he was learning.
He was reading ”doubtful Christians like Joyce Cary, Aldous Huxley, and William Faulkner. You couldn’t get Henry Miller in Mississippi then, with which one masturbates feeling like an intellectual snob.”
Monroe is fixated on Geronimo and convinces himself that he is a reincarnated, pale faced version of that Apache killer. He starts carrying a gun and wearing a reptilian, long coat. He meets Patsy or Patsy meets him. She is enamored with a version of himself that doesn’t exist. He doesn’t really like her all that much, but decides that given the current state of affairs she might actually be persuaded to sleep with him.
It does not go well.
Monroe has recently blossomed and when he looks in the mirror he sees the vestiges of the handsome man he will become. During the foreplay part Patsy just keeps calling him ugly, which shatters his fragile self-esteem, and then she sees his:
”My Lord, it looks like you’ve been wounded! Something they rammed through from behind….”
Okay, Barry Hannah you got me there. I laughed out loud. Poor, poor Monroe.
He has a roommate, not one he chose, not really one that anyone would choose. The self-proclaimed genius Bobby Dove Fleece who barely functions on a normal day and is generally down with some form of swamp flu or malaise from too much contact with the human race. He is not a stabilizing influence in Monroe’s life nor does he have much more luck with women.
”He disdained the female for the reason that none of the was a goddess with whom he could fall hopelessly in love. He jerked the tops of a few letters out of his satchel. ‘Oh Catherine, Catherine, you are my naked breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well do I gain again that day, noon, as the language of your body aroused you helplessly to climb upon the table from which I was eating, open your robe, and lie back supine, your thighs begging me to perpetuate the holiday of love with you…. Oh my lost sperm in you, oh happy, happy spewing away of ambition and power.’”
Oh, Bobby Dove, women just don’t deserve you...really they don’t.
Monroe plays the trumpet. Music, from what I read, is a theme in most of Hannah’s writing. He certainly shows reverence in this book when Monroe gets a chance with a makeshift band to play a tune in a “colored club”.
”Coming in tight, I hit the flatted seventh of what I meant to hit, way up there, and came back down in a baroque finesse such as I’d never heard from myself, jabbing, bright, playing the pants off Sweet Georgia, causing them to flutter in the beer and bacon smoke of the place. Silas began the dip-thrums and I unified with him while Joe locked the gates on the measures, back-busting that beautiful storm of hides and cymbals. Harry had found it and he began screaming with glee through that horn, every note the unlocked treasure of his soul--and things he had never had, yes, he hit an F above high C! What a bop the three of us were raising in there, what a debut, what a miracle. My horn pulsed fat and skinny. Oh, Harry was stinging them, but stinging them mellow. “
Now... that... is a writer that understand music on a whole new level. I can feel music like that, but I can’t write about music like that. As Bobby Dove says when Monroe pisses him off just go suck your trumpet Mr. Hannah.
This book is set in the 1960s in the South. Barry Hannah does not know a word that he is unafraid to use. He uses words long deemed unacceptable when addresses people of color. He uses them so much, that I thought I would eventually reach a saturation point where the words would no longer resonate with me, but they proved as squirm worthy at the end of the book as they do at the beginning of the book.
I hear teenage girls referring to each other, as terms of endearment, with words that I’d been taught a long time ago not to call a woman even if she did deserve it. I hear black men calling other black men names that would give them cause to beat me down, deservedly so, if I referred to them in such a manner. I guess my thought is that if I don’t want other people using certain language towards me then I should not use those words when referring to myself or my friends. Some words just need to be eradicated, like polio.
Monroe falls in love with this girl named Catherine. He knows so little about her that he can build these fabrications about her in his own mind that make her a woman of gossamer and stars. She is living with her Uncle, who is a white supremacist peripherally connected to the murder of Medgar Evars. That doesn’t bother Monroe as much as his paranoid belief that this Uncle has perverted designs on his own niece. This all culminates in a series of comical gun battles between her Uncle and the duo of Bobby Dove and Harry Monroe. They are a demented, inept version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
If you are having difficulties wooing a girl, shoot her uncle.
I don’t know how inebriated Hannah was while he was writing this novel, but parts of it read like a man pontificating about fantasy laden adventures with pieces of those stories floating in a lake of booze and connecting up randomly with other pieces of other stories. Images float out of the haze that left distinct impressions on me.
”She had a way of leaning on the door, a way of being small and brown with her jumbled black hair; her eyes were dull and smoky, and she sighed out the smell of a bruised flower.”
Or this tight, yet full fleshed, description of his neighbor.
”He was near eighty and looked like a dwarf who had started as normal but had been ridden into old age by some terrible concern astride his neck.”
I’ve never read Hannah’s short stories, but I hear that is where he really shines. This novel has some real humor, some moments of dark Southern traditional writing, some moments of beautiful clarity, but it is weighed down by too much muddy Mississippi water. Despite saying that there are scenes in this novel that I will never forget. He takes a few pot shots at William Faulkner and Henry James by complaining that those writers occasionally (well, ok, more than that) write sentences that require a reader to read them more than once to understand them. I forgive him because more than likely he was seeing double when he was trying to read those venerated writers anyway.
***3.5 stars out of 5***
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
January 20, 2019
I have wanted to read a Barry Hannah novel for some time, as he has been described as a genius who never caught on with the general public, and has been forgotten and ignored. I have to admit that a lot of his sentences were genius and were phrased in such a way you had to stop and think about what he just said. Such as: "Oh my God, if there is a God".
But..... the plot, the characters, not to mention the misogyny! I'm going to cut this short and just claim that as a 65 year old woman, I don't need to spend a lot of time inside the head of an adolescent male overly concerned with sex and violence. I'm glad to have this book behind me. As far as Barry Hannah is concerned, been there, done that, not going back.
But..... the plot, the characters, not to mention the misogyny! I'm going to cut this short and just claim that as a 65 year old woman, I don't need to spend a lot of time inside the head of an adolescent male overly concerned with sex and violence. I'm glad to have this book behind me. As far as Barry Hannah is concerned, been there, done that, not going back.
February 1, 2019
This rating was after reading the entire book (minus one chapter). The narrator and I were basically at an impasse for the entire book. We found no common ground and with this I say "farewell."
January 22, 2019
This is Barry Hannah’s debut novel (a finalist for the National Book Award in 1973 but loser to ‘Augustus’ by John Edward Williams). It’s the coming-of-age saga of Harriman (“Harry”) Monroe, set mostly in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s. It’s almost 400 pages of ramblings about mostly unlikeable people doing a lot of mostly unlikeable things. There was a serious disconnect for me during much of this novel: It’s saturated with sexism, racism, testosterone, and the bizarre. And the few females here are all silly caricatures, except for Mother Rooney.
But . . . there is something compelling about Hannah’s style, and it kept me reading through moments when I wanted to quit. The final third of the book, when Harry matures a bit and becomes less self-absorbed, was really good stuff. I’ll probably try Hannah’s short stories (his collection titled ‘High Lonesome’ was nominated for a Pulitzer) because I’d like to give him another shot and not judge his body of work on this one novel. But I’ve really struggled with how to rate this. I’m going with 2.5 stars for the overall experience, rounded up for the many layers of side character Bobby Dove Fleece and for some superb sentences like this one that didn’t tick me off or gross me out:
“I defended myself as a passive citizen into whose hand fate had thrown a gun and a plea for decency in a cul-de-sac of terror.”
~ Harriman (“Harry”) Monroe
But . . . there is something compelling about Hannah’s style, and it kept me reading through moments when I wanted to quit. The final third of the book, when Harry matures a bit and becomes less self-absorbed, was really good stuff. I’ll probably try Hannah’s short stories (his collection titled ‘High Lonesome’ was nominated for a Pulitzer) because I’d like to give him another shot and not judge his body of work on this one novel. But I’ve really struggled with how to rate this. I’m going with 2.5 stars for the overall experience, rounded up for the many layers of side character Bobby Dove Fleece and for some superb sentences like this one that didn’t tick me off or gross me out:
“I defended myself as a passive citizen into whose hand fate had thrown a gun and a plea for decency in a cul-de-sac of terror.”
~ Harriman (“Harry”) Monroe
Read
June 20, 2007not recommended for teenage males who already have a natural inclination to hate women. validates misogyny through hilarity. a good bildungsroman, actually--there aren't many, are there? maybe too much penis (in the abstract sense) for my taste.
September 27, 2011
Solid semi-autobiographical coming of age novel set in the mid-century south. The narrator is a dude's dude; he spends his time shooting at things that are beautiful and having sexual encounters with poorly developed girl characters. The other main points are John Phillips Sousa's marches, and his interactions with a white supremacist writer of smut letters to a long dead Northern Quaker.
All in all it's well written, totally ridiculous and a lot of fun.
All in all it's well written, totally ridiculous and a lot of fun.
May 31, 2020
Rambling, complete and utter nonsense for the first two parts of this book. The last part, as my friend Diane said, was readable. To be completely honest, I cannot fathom how this book won the William Faulkner Award. Perhaps on the basis that it is so rambling and nonsensical that it is considered literary? The entire book is deplorable. This will be my first and last book by Hannah.
Rated NFA - Not For Anyone. I have no idea what I just read.
Rated NFA - Not For Anyone. I have no idea what I just read.
June 20, 2011
Not really my bag. i know it is an early book of promise by a young guy figuring it out, but certain of the author's pre-occupations just ground me down. Some of it is probably that this is a "coming of age" story and, as a man who is forty, I came already.
January 5, 2014
If misogyny is not your thing, don't read this book. I know there are terrible things that go on this world, but frankly, I don't want to spend my time reading about them and then reading about others' praise of an author writing about them.
I've slogged through half the book for a book club that meets in two weeks. I'm going to have a hard time finishing it unless (here's a shred of hope) the second half is better, as a couple of other reviewers have said. I have my doubts, but we'll see...
I've slogged through half the book for a book club that meets in two weeks. I'm going to have a hard time finishing it unless (here's a shred of hope) the second half is better, as a couple of other reviewers have said. I have my doubts, but we'll see...
December 16, 2018
It's an alternate perspective on the beatnic life. The first third of the book had me wondering what I'd gotten myself into. But by the halfway point, I'd begun to realize Hannah's genius; he began to weave the seemingly disparate pieces into a quilt of such strange beauty. I was astonished. Then delighted. Engrossed.
Finally, I was disappointed the book had to end at all. I wanted more of everyone (especially Bobby Dove Fleece), more trumpet, more of those damn pistols, and more quotes like the following:
”Coming in tight, I hit the flatted seventh of what I meant to hit, way up there, and came back down in a baroque finesse such as I’d never heard from myself, jabbing, bright, playing the pants off Sweet Georgia, causing them to flutter in the beer and bacon smoke of the place. Silas began the dip-thrums and I unified with him while Joe locked the gates on the measures, back-busting that beautiful storm of hides and cymbals. Harry had found it and he began screaming with glee through that horn, every note the unlocked treasure of his soul--and things he had never had, yes, he hit an F above high C! What a bop the three of us were raising in there, what a debut, what a miracle. My horn pulsed fat and skinny. Oh, Harry was stinging them, but stinging them mellow. “
Like I said, the beat is strong in this one. But it's brilliant and sets itself apart on its own.
Finally, I was disappointed the book had to end at all. I wanted more of everyone (especially Bobby Dove Fleece), more trumpet, more of those damn pistols, and more quotes like the following:
”Coming in tight, I hit the flatted seventh of what I meant to hit, way up there, and came back down in a baroque finesse such as I’d never heard from myself, jabbing, bright, playing the pants off Sweet Georgia, causing them to flutter in the beer and bacon smoke of the place. Silas began the dip-thrums and I unified with him while Joe locked the gates on the measures, back-busting that beautiful storm of hides and cymbals. Harry had found it and he began screaming with glee through that horn, every note the unlocked treasure of his soul--and things he had never had, yes, he hit an F above high C! What a bop the three of us were raising in there, what a debut, what a miracle. My horn pulsed fat and skinny. Oh, Harry was stinging them, but stinging them mellow. “
Like I said, the beat is strong in this one. But it's brilliant and sets itself apart on its own.
April 1, 2013
I finished this book a week ago, and it's still difficult to get my mind around. I may come back later to change my rating. The nicest thing I can say about Harry Monroe, the protagonist in Barry Hannah's first novel, is that he is a product of his times. The story takes place in the fifties and sixties -- in Louisiana and Mississippi -- a time and place when it must have been more acceptable to be a misogynist. Harry calls girls "roaches," and I don't think he respected any female in his life. Harry isn't exactly racially enlightened either. He and his buddies drop the n-word regularly, but he's practically a member of the Rainbow Coalition compared to his white supremacist foe. A privileged kid, Harry spends a lot of time in the book wasting his parents' money as he tries to figure out what to do with his life. Still, Hannah's humorous characters and enjoyable dialogue redeemed this book. I think. Warning: the Kindle version I downloaded on Amazon was so poorly proofed, I'm not sure it had been proofed at all.
September 12, 2012
I am a big fan of Barry Hannah's work. This book is a gem, that few I know have read. If you write or just enjoy great writing it is worth picking up Hannah's short stories or this novel (autobiography?). There are moments of pure brilliance and story that keeps giving start to finish. Sad like Dubus there is no more forthcoming from this man.
May 10, 2017
What a great book. If you are a writer, keep a highlighter ready. There are so many wonderful lines in this book. If you want a primer on how to write in the first person, I dare you to find a better novel than this. Humor, violence, and heart... all here in this classic novel about coming of age. One of my all time favorites.
June 2, 2011
Really does meander, but the language keeps everything tight. A romp.
December 16, 2024
Yeah, that was not for me. Moving on.
Read
April 27, 2019Rain checked.
April 18, 2012
This is the 2nd from Hannah, the 1st and only other story I've read: The Tennis Handsome. I liked the description of this one, enjoyed the other story I read, have read good things about him, etc etc
This one starts out:
Blue Spades
In 1950 I'm eight years old and gravely beholding, from my vantage slot under the bleachers, the Dream of Pines Colored High School band. This group blew and marched so well they were scary.
The white band in town was nothing, compared--drab lines of orange wheeled about by the pleading of an old bald-headed pussy with ulcers who was more interested in his real estate than in his music. But the spade band was led by a fanatic man named Jones who risked everything to have the magnificent corps of student musicians he had. Jones was joked about and sworn at by educators, black and white, all over the parish.
Onward and upward.
Update
Moving along. An enjoyable read if you like words, language, and what can be done with it. I'm second-grader Harriman Monroe. My mind is full of little else but notes on the atrocities of World War II.
Or: "A peacock, by the way, will drill your ass if he knows the odds are anything near equal."
The story moves along at Harry's pace..."Then I'm eight, third grade, and have in part understood what I saw." He is the last child of Ode Elann & Donna Monroe, a brother married, a sister married, Harry a surprise. A bit later, "I was fourteen, and this Chevy wagon was supposed to be my mother's car, but I usurped it from her."..."In the eleventh grade I drank my first beer, and my facial condition evaporated."..."The worst of them all was told by me during a terrible period of my college life."..."Could the old man be thinking of me as a seventeen-year-old version of himself, making a smash in New York on his first visit?"
There is a point where Hannah's Harry is college age, then he goes back a pace or two to an earlier time. Round about here or so I began to wonder about stories like this,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,The Catcher in the Rye,Edisto,One Mississippi, and my take on them...although I don't recall, exactly, how time/age is treated in One Mississippi, I believe that one as well as the others confined the story to one age, give or take a year or two at most. This one covers a longer period of time and perhaps the story suffers because of that? There's all that high cockolorum when Harry is younger and when Harry is older, one doesn't look at him the same way. When a kid is eight and believes his old man is such and such it is hilarious. By fifteen it becomes boring.
His father, "third richest man in town"..."faked three paragraphs of thought"..."has read a book or two over above what he was assigned as a sophomore"...
At 8% into the story, there have been several incidents to move the story along, a peacock, a stray dog and his mule sidekick, the band and director, and Harley Butte, a major character ten years older than Harry.
This one starts out:
Blue Spades
In 1950 I'm eight years old and gravely beholding, from my vantage slot under the bleachers, the Dream of Pines Colored High School band. This group blew and marched so well they were scary.
The white band in town was nothing, compared--drab lines of orange wheeled about by the pleading of an old bald-headed pussy with ulcers who was more interested in his real estate than in his music. But the spade band was led by a fanatic man named Jones who risked everything to have the magnificent corps of student musicians he had. Jones was joked about and sworn at by educators, black and white, all over the parish.
Onward and upward.
Update
Moving along. An enjoyable read if you like words, language, and what can be done with it. I'm second-grader Harriman Monroe. My mind is full of little else but notes on the atrocities of World War II.
Or: "A peacock, by the way, will drill your ass if he knows the odds are anything near equal."
The story moves along at Harry's pace..."Then I'm eight, third grade, and have in part understood what I saw." He is the last child of Ode Elann & Donna Monroe, a brother married, a sister married, Harry a surprise. A bit later, "I was fourteen, and this Chevy wagon was supposed to be my mother's car, but I usurped it from her."..."In the eleventh grade I drank my first beer, and my facial condition evaporated."..."The worst of them all was told by me during a terrible period of my college life."..."Could the old man be thinking of me as a seventeen-year-old version of himself, making a smash in New York on his first visit?"
There is a point where Hannah's Harry is college age, then he goes back a pace or two to an earlier time. Round about here or so I began to wonder about stories like this,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,The Catcher in the Rye,Edisto,One Mississippi, and my take on them...although I don't recall, exactly, how time/age is treated in One Mississippi, I believe that one as well as the others confined the story to one age, give or take a year or two at most. This one covers a longer period of time and perhaps the story suffers because of that? There's all that high cockolorum when Harry is younger and when Harry is older, one doesn't look at him the same way. When a kid is eight and believes his old man is such and such it is hilarious. By fifteen it becomes boring.
His father, "third richest man in town"..."faked three paragraphs of thought"..."has read a book or two over above what he was assigned as a sophomore"...
At 8% into the story, there have been several incidents to move the story along, a peacock, a stray dog and his mule sidekick, the band and director, and Harley Butte, a major character ten years older than Harry.
February 20, 2024
God bless Hannah. This has been halfway finished for three years now. The writing is fine, great in places, and the opening brilliant---the main problem is that the book is pushing 400 pages when it should be around 200. There is considerable bloat here, and a lot of scenes that, more or less, tell the same thing. My attention wanes, even with Mr. Hannah's verbal firecracks going off every page or so.
When correcting an early draft of A SUN ALSO RISES, Fitzgerald said that Hemingway should cut entire scenes that miss their mark, instead of pruning and trimming all the existing scenes. I think GERONIMO REX needs this treatment. There are scenes in the book that are vivid and beautiful, and scenes that are more or less the same exact thing, only far less effective.
The book reminds me of Henry Miller---where seems perfect and brilliant if you flip to a random page and read the prose---though the narrative as a whole does not pull me in.
When correcting an early draft of A SUN ALSO RISES, Fitzgerald said that Hemingway should cut entire scenes that miss their mark, instead of pruning and trimming all the existing scenes. I think GERONIMO REX needs this treatment. There are scenes in the book that are vivid and beautiful, and scenes that are more or less the same exact thing, only far less effective.
The book reminds me of Henry Miller---where seems perfect and brilliant if you flip to a random page and read the prose---though the narrative as a whole does not pull me in.
January 9, 2017
It's been a little over a month since I finished this book, but I liked it quite a bit. I'm a big fan of Hannah's writing style; very few authors can so accurately and distinctively portray the South while writing in a style that almost sounds like it's from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in. Hannah also has a way of describing mundane or everyday events, actions, and/or moments using words or phrases that come out of leftfield, that would never occur to most writers, but still create a clear (and unique) image of what is happening.
It's not Proust, but it's highly entertaining and Hannah's skill combined with the deep southern setting gives it an edge over most of its peers. My only complaint with this one is that the Peter story arc wraps up a little bit too neatly or conveniently at the end. I will keep myself from saying anymore as to not reveal any of the plot for those who have not read it.
It's not Proust, but it's highly entertaining and Hannah's skill combined with the deep southern setting gives it an edge over most of its peers. My only complaint with this one is that the Peter story arc wraps up a little bit too neatly or conveniently at the end. I will keep myself from saying anymore as to not reveal any of the plot for those who have not read it.
July 10, 2010
It took me weeks to read this, I plodded through the first half and then demolished the second half. I'm not from the south, but I have a feeling I should assume that his stories would seem as outlandish as they do accurate. Hannah tells a thousand stories, plenty of them begin an end in one paragraph, and the protagonist goes through the book like some sort of Don Quixote of the '60s and '70s south. By the time you finish reading this book, you'll think you have an appreciate for marching band music, even if you don't, which is a pretty good trick. Great.
March 31, 2010
Great book with one of the most dynamic narrators I can remember. Stunning Deep South picaresque.
June 6, 2015
I am sorry, tedious.
July 18, 2025
There are books that literally burn through the spine as they’re read, not with wisdom, not with grace, but with a kind of deranged, Pentecostal fervor that plays with snakes and speaks in tongues only the misfits understand. Geronimo Rex is one such book, a cracked hymn to failure and lust and the Southern male ego, set loose in a world not built for the grotesque bloom of its narrator’s desire. Barry Hannah didn’t write characters so much as he opened his mouth and vomited damaged men in full, and Harry Monroe comes out like a upchuck blast from hell.
Monroe is the fool-prince of Dream of Pines, Louisiana, a town conjured by name alone to promise sorrow. He is one of those Southern boys whose swagger is mostly bluff and whose dreams are stitched together with wet shame and trumpet valves. He wanted Harvard. He got Hedermansever. He wanted to be something greater than what he is but found instead the gospel of mediocrity and sin, and followed it all the way to the dorm room where Bobby Dove Fleece kept a shrine to his own madness, masturbated to letters he'd written himself, and waited for the rapture of a woman that would never arrive.
There’s nothing clean or redemptive in Monroe’s climb, hell, it’s not even a climb. It’s a crawl through the sewage of libido, horn spit, racial slurs, and that peculiar Southern condition of wanting everything and deserving none of it. Hannah never pretends to clean up after his characters, and he sure as hell doesn’t bathe them in the warm light of moral clarity. He lets them sweat in their own stink, and we watch as Harry, in the slow-burn delusion of being Geronimo reborn, straps on a trench coat and a pistol like the last pale ghost of Apache rage, full of impotence and jazz and nothing holy at all.
His women? God help them. They’re too much for him, every one of them, but it’s Patsy who bears the first brunt of his ambition. She sees in him some imagined hero, the kind women invent when they’re young and haven’t yet learned the bitter physics of manhood. Monroe doesn’t love her, he doesn’t even like her, but he wants what she might give, and when she calls him ugly in the breathless moment of nearly-making-love, the fragile scaffolding of his self-image collapses. She sees him naked and recoils not with disgust but with awe-struck pity: "My Lord, it looks like you’ve been wounded!" she says, and it’s a bullet to the soul.
But Monroe plays the trumpet, and in that, Hannah gives him one miracle. Just one. In a black club thick with grease and smoke, he finds the thing he will never find in love or theology or Fleece’s mad philosophy. He finds song. He finds God, briefly, in the swell of Sweet Georgia and the sweat of rhythm, a glimpse of the man he might have been had he been born blessed. “My horn pulsed fat and skinny,” he says. And for one note, he stings the world mellow.
Hannah, like Faulkner on mescaline, writes not to teach but to testify. His language is weaponized, every line loaded with vinegar and spit. He does not fear offense. His prose is Southern in the way kudzu is Southern: beautiful, invasive, choking everything to death.
There is Catherine too, Monroe’s gossamer idol, a girl he loves more in absence than in flesh, made sacred only because he knows so little of her. She is the fantasy we all carry for too long, the one we sharpen in memory until it can no longer bleed. Her uncle, a slithering remnant of Mississippi hate, is an echo of a real monster, tied, loosely, to the murder of Medgar Evers, and Monroe, in his divine idiocy, decides the surest path to a woman’s heart is to shoot her kin. A Southern courtship, Hannah-style.
And if this sounds like madness, it’s because it is. The novel is less a story than a fever. Scenes drift in and out like heat mirages on I-55. One minute Monroe is reading Faulkner and failing pre-med. The next, he’s reenacting Apache vengeance on a makeshift battlefield of his own making. The logic isn’t linear. It’s alcoholic.
There’s a neighbor described like a man “ridden into old age by some terrible concern astride his neck.” That’s the whole South in a sentence. That’s the whole book.
And yet, for all its vulgarity, for the liberal use of words that hang like rotten fruit from the mouth, for its blasphemy, for its ugly boys and ruined dreams, there is something true inside it. Something holy in its unholiness. Geronimo Rex is not a book about becoming a man. It’s a book about failing to become one, and doing so loudly, with brass and blood and the laughter of forgotten ghosts who once wanted more.
If A Confederacy of Dunces took itself less seriously and Blood Meridian got drunk on its own body odor, Geronimo Rex would be their bastard child. It is not a book to love. It is a book to endure. To witness. To reckon with.
And it is, somehow, unforgettable. Read it!
Monroe is the fool-prince of Dream of Pines, Louisiana, a town conjured by name alone to promise sorrow. He is one of those Southern boys whose swagger is mostly bluff and whose dreams are stitched together with wet shame and trumpet valves. He wanted Harvard. He got Hedermansever. He wanted to be something greater than what he is but found instead the gospel of mediocrity and sin, and followed it all the way to the dorm room where Bobby Dove Fleece kept a shrine to his own madness, masturbated to letters he'd written himself, and waited for the rapture of a woman that would never arrive.
There’s nothing clean or redemptive in Monroe’s climb, hell, it’s not even a climb. It’s a crawl through the sewage of libido, horn spit, racial slurs, and that peculiar Southern condition of wanting everything and deserving none of it. Hannah never pretends to clean up after his characters, and he sure as hell doesn’t bathe them in the warm light of moral clarity. He lets them sweat in their own stink, and we watch as Harry, in the slow-burn delusion of being Geronimo reborn, straps on a trench coat and a pistol like the last pale ghost of Apache rage, full of impotence and jazz and nothing holy at all.
His women? God help them. They’re too much for him, every one of them, but it’s Patsy who bears the first brunt of his ambition. She sees in him some imagined hero, the kind women invent when they’re young and haven’t yet learned the bitter physics of manhood. Monroe doesn’t love her, he doesn’t even like her, but he wants what she might give, and when she calls him ugly in the breathless moment of nearly-making-love, the fragile scaffolding of his self-image collapses. She sees him naked and recoils not with disgust but with awe-struck pity: "My Lord, it looks like you’ve been wounded!" she says, and it’s a bullet to the soul.
But Monroe plays the trumpet, and in that, Hannah gives him one miracle. Just one. In a black club thick with grease and smoke, he finds the thing he will never find in love or theology or Fleece’s mad philosophy. He finds song. He finds God, briefly, in the swell of Sweet Georgia and the sweat of rhythm, a glimpse of the man he might have been had he been born blessed. “My horn pulsed fat and skinny,” he says. And for one note, he stings the world mellow.
Hannah, like Faulkner on mescaline, writes not to teach but to testify. His language is weaponized, every line loaded with vinegar and spit. He does not fear offense. His prose is Southern in the way kudzu is Southern: beautiful, invasive, choking everything to death.
There is Catherine too, Monroe’s gossamer idol, a girl he loves more in absence than in flesh, made sacred only because he knows so little of her. She is the fantasy we all carry for too long, the one we sharpen in memory until it can no longer bleed. Her uncle, a slithering remnant of Mississippi hate, is an echo of a real monster, tied, loosely, to the murder of Medgar Evers, and Monroe, in his divine idiocy, decides the surest path to a woman’s heart is to shoot her kin. A Southern courtship, Hannah-style.
And if this sounds like madness, it’s because it is. The novel is less a story than a fever. Scenes drift in and out like heat mirages on I-55. One minute Monroe is reading Faulkner and failing pre-med. The next, he’s reenacting Apache vengeance on a makeshift battlefield of his own making. The logic isn’t linear. It’s alcoholic.
There’s a neighbor described like a man “ridden into old age by some terrible concern astride his neck.” That’s the whole South in a sentence. That’s the whole book.
And yet, for all its vulgarity, for the liberal use of words that hang like rotten fruit from the mouth, for its blasphemy, for its ugly boys and ruined dreams, there is something true inside it. Something holy in its unholiness. Geronimo Rex is not a book about becoming a man. It’s a book about failing to become one, and doing so loudly, with brass and blood and the laughter of forgotten ghosts who once wanted more.
If A Confederacy of Dunces took itself less seriously and Blood Meridian got drunk on its own body odor, Geronimo Rex would be their bastard child. It is not a book to love. It is a book to endure. To witness. To reckon with.
And it is, somehow, unforgettable. Read it!
December 11, 2023
Oh crikey, this wasn't easy, but I persevered. This novel is one part misogyny with two parts racism. The good news is that Hannah definitely thinks racism is bad. The bad news is his misogyny feels as natural as breathing. There isn't one female character that isn't either prone to histrionics to the point of ridicule or used as a sexualized plot device. Occasionally both. It gets noticeable uncomfortably early on.
Geronimo Rex is an American coming-of-age story that is split into three parts: the first part, centered around young Harry Monroe, is pretty forgettable - it sets our very unlikable hero on a path to choices he will make later in life, but doesn't actually have much of an overarching plot in and of itself. He jumps from one event to another and there aren't any interesting characters here to tie it together. And he exhausts the lexicon of derogatory terms for women all the while.
The core plot of Geronimo Rex begins without much ceremony in the early days of the novel's second section, with the introduction of Fleece. And alright, I will give some credit here - the unlikely friendship-by-circumstance of Harry and Fleece is a shining light in this book. The slow burn from constant irritation to complete loyalty is so convincing, and warmed me to both characters in a way that they never could have done alone. The implementation of the core plot is strange, though - they just torment a mentally-ill racist repeatedly for at least half of the book, sometimes Hannah gives a reason for them doing so and sometimes he doesn't. All of the characters in this book are pretty indefensible. (Except for Mother Rooney. And one can also make a case for Catherine being vulnerable and led astray. But I digress.)
The third part struggles from not having much of a point of view on its own - it exists partially to wrap up the tormenting storyline, partially to give Harry a sort-of-happy-but-not-really ending, and to try and develop some new characters who had real potential but just get left by the wayside at the end. The ending felt cut short, with no real takeaway to be had. It was clearly a very ambitious debut, an American novel to rival John Irving, but what message am I supposed to be learning as a result of the 381 pages I powered through?
The weird thing is, although I didn't like it, it definitely left an impression on me. I hate referring to people as a man of their time, but taking Barry Hannah out of his context as a mid-20th century man from the Southern states, he was a talented writer. Certain scenes of Dream of Pines and beyond are seared into my brain from his very raw descriptions of them, and I never thought I would excitedly champion a fictional marching band's performance. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but contextual problems that haven't aged well and a pretty flimsy storyline don't merit it more than 1 star for me.
Geronimo Rex is an American coming-of-age story that is split into three parts: the first part, centered around young Harry Monroe, is pretty forgettable - it sets our very unlikable hero on a path to choices he will make later in life, but doesn't actually have much of an overarching plot in and of itself. He jumps from one event to another and there aren't any interesting characters here to tie it together. And he exhausts the lexicon of derogatory terms for women all the while.
The core plot of Geronimo Rex begins without much ceremony in the early days of the novel's second section, with the introduction of Fleece. And alright, I will give some credit here - the unlikely friendship-by-circumstance of Harry and Fleece is a shining light in this book. The slow burn from constant irritation to complete loyalty is so convincing, and warmed me to both characters in a way that they never could have done alone. The implementation of the core plot is strange, though - they just torment a mentally-ill racist repeatedly for at least half of the book, sometimes Hannah gives a reason for them doing so and sometimes he doesn't. All of the characters in this book are pretty indefensible. (Except for Mother Rooney. And one can also make a case for Catherine being vulnerable and led astray. But I digress.)
The third part struggles from not having much of a point of view on its own - it exists partially to wrap up the tormenting storyline, partially to give Harry a sort-of-happy-but-not-really ending, and to try and develop some new characters who had real potential but just get left by the wayside at the end. The ending felt cut short, with no real takeaway to be had. It was clearly a very ambitious debut, an American novel to rival John Irving, but what message am I supposed to be learning as a result of the 381 pages I powered through?
The weird thing is, although I didn't like it, it definitely left an impression on me. I hate referring to people as a man of their time, but taking Barry Hannah out of his context as a mid-20th century man from the Southern states, he was a talented writer. Certain scenes of Dream of Pines and beyond are seared into my brain from his very raw descriptions of them, and I never thought I would excitedly champion a fictional marching band's performance. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but contextual problems that haven't aged well and a pretty flimsy storyline don't merit it more than 1 star for me.
August 15, 2018
I gave up on page 161. I wanted to like this book, my first try to read Barry Hannah because I thought I remembered Larry Brown said this was one of his mentors. So anything by a mentor of Larry Brown ought to be good, I reasoned. I found I did not like the main character but was managing to get over not liking the character by somewhat enjoying the writing in the first section of the book. I found many sections humorous. But he lost me when the college years began. I have no idea what the author was trying to do stylistically with the first chapter of the college years, but he lost me. Yet I persisted because he was a mentor of Larry Brown, one of my favorite writers. I managed to get through the next 4 chapters, but I found myself having to push myself to get on with reading the book, which seemed endless. Then I went to my local book club meeting and decided that there are far too many other books I would rather read than Geronimo Rex and life is too short to read books I do not enjoy. So, I am stopping and hopefully on to a more satisfying read.
September 16, 2018
Barry Hannah writes, at times, like a latter-day William Faulkner. In this book, monologues from odd characters are astonishingly rich and original. His work is a little heavy on the plot, and his plotting can feel contrived. Nevertheless, a southern writer worth reading, one of the best from the late 20th century/early 21st.
This was his first novel, and it feels like it in spots. In particular, there's a bit of ego in it; he seems proud of the exploits of his fictionalized college friends and their exploits, even though he was already 29 years old when it was published. To a mature reader, aspects of the book can seem youthfully self-indulgent.
A caution: If you are of the opinion that there are certain words that should not be used by white writers, steer clear of this book. Hannah's more racist characters make abundant use of the n-word and other abusive language.
This was his first novel, and it feels like it in spots. In particular, there's a bit of ego in it; he seems proud of the exploits of his fictionalized college friends and their exploits, even though he was already 29 years old when it was published. To a mature reader, aspects of the book can seem youthfully self-indulgent.
A caution: If you are of the opinion that there are certain words that should not be used by white writers, steer clear of this book. Hannah's more racist characters make abundant use of the n-word and other abusive language.
April 6, 2025
Superb. Catcher in the Rye for grown ups. Not the cup of tea (or for that matter genus of leaf) of one seeking prescriptions on how to elevate their moral correctness in seven easy steps. Hannah’s prose, while uneven compared to the stylistic mastery of his later stories, still bears the magic of the real thing in that each sentence surprises you while somehow emerging whole and rational from the foregoing. His renderings of life — grotesque yet alive with sympathy — are complex, perceptive, and first rate. I contend that what’s often mistaken for savage impropriety in Hannah’s writing is in fact a radical egalitarianism that holds us all accountable to the flaming shitpile of the human id. In its way a holy vision worthy of modern consideration. A wide berth is suggested if lust, epithet, or flat out raving lunacy are nonstarters.
April 10, 2020
I have read several of Barry Hannah’s later books years ago.Airships, Ray and the Tennis Handsome. Geronimo Rex is Hannah’s first novel and it is along detailed narrative of a young Southerner Harry Monroe’s life. The novel begins in the fifties and ends in the mid sixties,The novel is packed with colorful characters , improbable events and a baroque style of prose. I enjoyed this Southern shaggy dog story. Hannah’s work seems a little dated in its depictions of the world. Harry’s ideas about women and black people are beyond the pale but I do believe they are representative of the time the main character was growing up. Sentence by sentence Hannah can be as entertaining as any writer from that era
July 1, 2018
This is the most captivating novel I've ever read and I know no other way to put it. Barry Hannah's syntax will leave you in awe; he seems to construct sentences imaginatively, but yet they are intensely raw with their intimacy. The narrator, Harry Monroe, will draw you in with tales of incendiary trouble making and passionate introspection, from the ever-curious Southeastern region during the 1950's and 60's. Writing a review of this novel seems almost uncivil because of Geronimo Rex's eminence, but hopefully it will inspire someone else to try this one out. You won't regret it.
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