His 2001 novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan presented a gentler side to his hellraising characters.
"Yonder Stands Your Orphan" is Barry Hannah's first novel in 10 years, and that is a literary event.
"Yonder Stands Your Orphan," for all its color and liveliness, lacks a bonding agent to fasten its disparate strands together.
The outlaws and oddballs of "Yonder Stands Your Orphan," in thrall to a sinister character named Man Mortimer, earn the author's pity.
Nearly 30 years after "Geronimo Rex" and 10 years since Hannah's previous novel, "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" is characterized by many of the same strengths and shortcomings Updike first identified.
"Yonder Stands Your Orphan" (the title is a phrase from the Bob Dylan song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue") in this sense is a baroque overelaboration of the new Southern novel.
But if "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" represents a welcome return of a brilliant writer, it is a novel paradoxically too solidly within a tradition to be a success for this author.
And he has created a character in "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" who shows such lighthearted indifference to the havoc he wreaks around him that he seems something new in the depiction of human depravity.
"Someone called my wife to say, 'You'll have to take care of your orphan soon.' Al-Shabaab targets everybody who is doing something against them– a woman in civil society, a traditional elder, a businessman, a religious leader.
Hannah's other novels include The Tennis Handsome (1983), which portrays the misadventures of a dissipated professional tennis player; Hey Jack! (1987); Never Die (1991), an offbeat treatment of the western genre; and Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), which tells the stories of a town of eclectic and unsavoury characters, including a murderer, a former drug addict, and a septuagenarian beauty.
