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mcckev's review against another edition
2.0
I absolutely loved Airships. I've read it cover to cover maybe three times. I've read the stories Testimony of Pilot and Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa maybe a dozen times each. I wanted to love Captain Maximus, I really did, but it felt like it was comprised of a couple of stories Gordon Lish cut from Airships and some yarns Hannah would tell his drinking buddies. The quality of stories in Airships was pretty uneven, a few of the twenty stories were duds, but then there are a handful of masterpieces. When Hannah is on, he's really on. None of the stories in Maximus hold a candle to the good stories in Airships. If Maximus wasn't written by Hannah, I would have quit reading after the first two or three stories.
Every once in a while you catch a glimpse of Hannah's genius in a very well crafted sentence, but overall, this collection was a disappointment.
Every once in a while you catch a glimpse of Hannah's genius in a very well crafted sentence, but overall, this collection was a disappointment.
xterminal's review
4.0
Barry Hannah, Captain Maximus (Penguin, 1985)
Barry Hannah is America's most sadly neglected literary author since John Fante, and that's a shame. Hannah's place in literary history should be carved in rock, if for no other reason than having written one of the world's few absolutely perfect novels in The Tennis Handsome; had he retired after that, he should have been able to retire secure in the fact that his literary legacy would stand as long as humanity does. But he kept writing, and every once in a while he'd turn out another wonderful and overlooked gem. The short story collection Captain Maximus is without doubt one of them.
Hannah hands us a small (too small, for my tastes, but you can't have everything; it runs ninety-two pages in trade paperback) collection of stories, many of which had only appeared in limited runs or places one normally doesn't find short stories (for example, the newspaper) before appearing here. Spanning the first half of the eighties, the collection shows once again why Barry Hannah should be hoisted on the shoulders of the literary establishment to tapdance on the heads of vacuous New York Times bestseller list residents; his characters are savage, unrepentant, funny, mixed-up, and above all fiercely intelligent and with a finely-honed sense of the ironies of their existences. Most of the stories here are only a few pages long, but still manage to pack a wallop. As a side note, this is unmistakably work of that genre known as "southern fiction;" had a genetic engineer taken the best parts of the creative genes of Flannery O'Connor and mated them with the same from Faulkner, they might have gotten Barry Hannah (or, at least, the oddly fraternal twins of Hannah and Ferrol Sams). So let your taste for whatever it is that makes "southern fiction" southern be your guide, but one way or the other, give Hannah a try. If you want a small dose first, by all means, start here.
(Side note: it is amusing that 90% of the bibliographies of Hannah I found on the web list Captain Maximus as a novel. Ah, the hazards of letting books go out of print for years.) *** ½
Barry Hannah is America's most sadly neglected literary author since John Fante, and that's a shame. Hannah's place in literary history should be carved in rock, if for no other reason than having written one of the world's few absolutely perfect novels in The Tennis Handsome; had he retired after that, he should have been able to retire secure in the fact that his literary legacy would stand as long as humanity does. But he kept writing, and every once in a while he'd turn out another wonderful and overlooked gem. The short story collection Captain Maximus is without doubt one of them.
Hannah hands us a small (too small, for my tastes, but you can't have everything; it runs ninety-two pages in trade paperback) collection of stories, many of which had only appeared in limited runs or places one normally doesn't find short stories (for example, the newspaper) before appearing here. Spanning the first half of the eighties, the collection shows once again why Barry Hannah should be hoisted on the shoulders of the literary establishment to tapdance on the heads of vacuous New York Times bestseller list residents; his characters are savage, unrepentant, funny, mixed-up, and above all fiercely intelligent and with a finely-honed sense of the ironies of their existences. Most of the stories here are only a few pages long, but still manage to pack a wallop. As a side note, this is unmistakably work of that genre known as "southern fiction;" had a genetic engineer taken the best parts of the creative genes of Flannery O'Connor and mated them with the same from Faulkner, they might have gotten Barry Hannah (or, at least, the oddly fraternal twins of Hannah and Ferrol Sams). So let your taste for whatever it is that makes "southern fiction" southern be your guide, but one way or the other, give Hannah a try. If you want a small dose first, by all means, start here.
(Side note: it is amusing that 90% of the bibliographies of Hannah I found on the web list Captain Maximus as a novel. Ah, the hazards of letting books go out of print for years.) *** ½
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