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Yonder Stands Your Orphan
Barry Hannah. Grove Press (paperback): 2001. ISBN: 0802138934. 336 pages.
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"He was undergoing stress, a rapid melancholy that overcame him once he had vomited on another person. This thing wanting out of him so quickly, like a hot weasel in a tube." How's that for an image, folks?
And yet that whimsical little sentence is but one of thousands of brilliant bits of wordplay from Barry Hannah's unexpectedly charming novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan. If you care about truly great writing, you are about to be reduced to a twitching, slobbering, and insatiable slave to this Major Talent, who turns Faulkner's rural Mississippi on its proverbial and ragged ear. In this alternately sweet and hilariously nasty cautionary tale, Hannah creates a cast of characters who are doomed to lurk in the corners of your consciousness for the duration, as each takes his or her particular brand of revenge on the small town of Eagle Lake. These include frustrated pimp Man Mortimer, who mourns the fading of his youthful Fabian looks by launching a cheerful campaign of terror, Isaac and Jacob Allison, two prepubescent brothers who discover a mysterious pair of skeletons in the trunk of a car they've borrowed, and the fabulously detestable, perpetually nauseas Sidney Farté, who watches aging town beauty Melanie Wooten with lazy hooded eyes. "He could barely stand her presence. Oh, he wanted to sodomize her and puke on her back, but he certainly didn't respect her." Genius, friends, genius.
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