By Katie Magee
When I was a junior in high school, one of my teachers handed me a copy of Barry Hannah’s Airships and said, “Read it. Just a warning, it’s pretty messed up.” Although, he didn’t say “messed.” He said another word that ended in -ed, but started with an f. To this day, I still thank him for letting me borrow his copy of that book. There are not many books that I have bought more than once, but I have probably bought this book close to seven or eight times, simply because I cannot keep it to myself. I pass it off to friends, people from the South, people in the South, people who need a little Barry Hannah in their lives.
“Love Too Long,” which is probably my favorite story in the book, is about a man whose wife has left him for the last time. This story is full of clever, twisted, beautifully dark sentences. I remember reading the last paragraph of it and immediately searching my room for a pen because I just had to circle the entire thing. Here it is:
Nothing in the world matters but you and your woman. Friendship and politics go to hell. My friend Dan three doors down, who’s also unemployed, comes over when he can make the price of a six-pack.
It’s not the same.
I’m going to die from love.
This is, and will probably remain to be for a while, my favorite ending to a short story.
“Eating Wife and Friends,” another favorite of mine, is a sort of dystopian story about an America where food is scarce. A landlady, Mrs. Neap, has tenants in her home and she gets tired of them. They make too much noise, they contribute nothing, and they constantly break her rules. There are rumors going around that people are starting to eat humans and Mrs. Neap is not at all taken aback by the idea, nor are the tenants.
“Coming Close to Donna” is, in my opinion, the most disturbingly beautiful story in the book. At the very beginning, Hannah outlines a scene for us in which two boys are fighting over Donna in a cemetery while she and a seemingly uninterested boy watch from a Lincoln convertible. This story has more twists and turns in three pages than I have ever read in a short story before.
If you like grit lit or a good ol’ southern story, you should definitely read Airships. Barry Hannah has a way of creating a whole world in a story, a world where you probably would not want to live, but you would love to read about forever. Hannah was a southern man, a man whose life, today, is lived through stories told by his past students, past writing buddies, and people he ticked off. He had such a wonderful voice that shows through in every single sentence he formed.
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