Far From Brooklyn

There are writers that blow you away one time.  A single book drives you crazy with delight, and as a result you read every single one of his books.

And you never experience that same whoosh of excitement. The thrill is gone.

After a few years, you know you’re not going to like the next one much.  But you keep on reading, hoping after vain hope for one more tingle.

I first read Airships a-way back in the late 1970s. I’d never read anything like it.  The sentences were gristly and hilarious, with unexpected words popping up like foreign matter dredged out of an old canal.

Barry Hannah was one of a handful of writers whose sentences, whose voice, so captured me that it was difficult for me to write within days of reading anything he wrote.  His sentences would ring in my ears so strongly that everything I wrote came up Hannah.

In fact, it was hard for me to fully enjoy the sale of my first published story (sold perhaps not coincidentally to Hannah’s longtime editor Gordon Lish) because encased in that story was a sentence that I knew I owed to Hannah: “She turned to me and handed me a tomato as red and perfect as a gift."  It was my sentence but I was wearing my Hannah cloak when I wrote it – and I knew it.

For 25 years or so I have read each Hannah book when I it came out – Ray, The Tennis Handsome, Captain Maximus, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, Hey Jack! – in search of that Hannah thrill, but it seemed to be delivered in ever smaller measures.  (But really, isn’t "Yonder Stands Your Orphan” the best title ever derived from a lyric?)

I still think Hannah is one of the – well, not one of the great writers of the last century, but certainly one of the great stylists.  What a voice!  What sentences!  When his next book comes out, I’m sure I’ll read it again, even knowing that I haven’t much enjoyed his work in years.

Now this all comes to mind because I just finished Thomas Perry latest mystery.   Not that Perry is in the same league as Hannah, or even that they should be compared.  But Perry wrote one of the great comic mystery/caper novels, Metzger’s Dog, back in the early ‘80s, and so I’ve been reading him ever since.

Silence is the latest one I’ve pulled off the shelf.  I turned the pages.  It wasn’t bad.  It took care of the flight back to LA.

But it was no Metzger’s Dog.

Silence by Thomas Perry.