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A Review by Sven Birkets

In case you don't know, the title of Barry Hannah's new novel is drawn from Bob Dylan's apocalyptic ballad, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," a fact which would be only incidentally interesting – there are orphans, there are guns – were it not for the fact that Hannah, too, has written an apocalyptic ballad, a work of such gut-churning American gothic surreal-realism (or whatever you want to call it) that has to be compared not just to Flannery O'Connor, but to Dylan of the great early mid-period, circa Highway 61 Revisited.

Just as Dylan cracked open the simple lyrical vessel of the standard folksong, filling its spaces with an anger, violence, and desolation, nailing as no one had before the feeling of the times, so Hannah has in Yonder Stands Your Orphan stripped the Southern storybook back down to raw beams and flooring, then rebuilt the whole thing using twists of scene and execrated imagery that all but bypass the standard plot expectation, routing to the gut with the speed and efficiency that we ascribe to outlawed substances. Yes, of course there is a premise, a meaningful motion among a cast of ingrown townspeople in a tiny Mississippi backwater, but that is abruptly torn open by the rampaging of one Man Mortimer, a malign killer bent on tunneling to the heart of evil, who does not subside until his psychotic momentum has run its full course. Sound and fury, and it would be nothing extraordinary were it not for Hannah's language, the sizzling poetry of his every phrase and sentence. There is one man, a saxophonist, who "seemed to stand knee-deep in unseen wreckage." Another, who reaches the "cool point of view where beauty in women shriveled back to what it was actually worth." Throughout, the inspired scatter of Hannah's observations: "In this state live men and women nostalgic by age eleven. For things rambling, wooden, rain-worn, wood-smoked, slightly decrepit. The heft of dirty nickels." You can't read and not feel the world pushing in through the meshes of the words.

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