Tennis Handsome [Paperback]

Good grief, how can it be that none of Amazon.com's astute readers has yet whipped up a review of this remarkable gem? Barry Hannah, for anybody ignorant of his place in the pantheon of letters, is a whiz bang lightning bolt of a writer, a Mississippian wild and dangerous, and this book is a fine example of his work. You'll laugh till you cry and then some.

Yippee and hoorah for BH!!!!!!!

This book is a masterpiece, a comical one that is. Barry Hannah takes us through the lives of the most unlikeable batch of characters I have ever read. A tennis "star" who can be compared to a faberge egg, beautiful on the outside, but hollow on the inside. A doctor whose purpose in life seems to be the brain for the tennis "star" and to sexually degrade every woman he meets. A homosexual turned heterosexual with one glance at a certain woman, and an vietnam vet who is having an incestuous relationship with his aunt. The men's characters are all explored in the novel, but the women's characters seem only to be ornaments for the males. It might have made a better read if Barry Hannah had explored their characters a little more and added some depth to them, but what's done is done. All the characters, both men and women, are missing something either physically or emotionally. You almost want to feel sorry for the characters, but then you turn the page, and you take that feeling back. The situations that the characters find themselves in, tend to be very comical. Electric shock by a toaster to get inspired, finding a cure for the common cold, ambushing bums to scare and shoot them, an attempted rape by a walrus. It almost feels like Hannah is trying to hard to be outrageous. All I can say is this book is silly. Good reading for a rainy day!

Attempted rape by a walrus is a perfect symbol of the nature of lust that serves as a theme of the work. In fact, the walrus may prove for some to be the least shocking expression of lust in the work. Perhaps the blunt primitive quality that is acceptable in the walrus makes a point concerning what is or is not acceptable in man. If the nature of man is truly more complex than the nature of a walrus, would not our expressions of lust be that much more complex than those of a walrus? And then there's the question of love-- where does lust meet love? The work characterizes men and women who seem to not be able to distinguish, and who seem too plainly content with not even concerning themselves with it. The description of God on page 72 is amusing but holds the most merit of any comment in the work concerning the theme of man's primitive desire. God is portrayed as not only human, but a "regular" human who wears shoes from Sears. This lack of a sense of divinity being associated with God is everywhere in the work also associated with man. There seem to be no ideals, goals, perceptions of progress, hope, or faith in terms of any aspect of life aside from pure and often brutal or abusive forms of lust. True: this is a side of humanity that is often ignored or buried from reflection. True: the issues the characters raise, each a different type of primitive, are found in our spinning lives on a daily basis. True: most of us can laugh at what we consider abnormal without ever empathizing with the confusion involved in an "abnormal" path. But the overall message of the work ignores more realities than it accurately portrays. Granted, it is fiction. But it is a fiction which seems to be motivated towards expressing certain realistic sides of human nature, and therefore is not complete in its task if it does not thoroughly address those sides. The changes in perspective were fantastically manipulated to get everything concerning Baby, French, Word, and Bobby completely characterized and successful as far as nurturing the theme. However, the disappointment of the author's lack of integrity in portraying the female characters overwhelms me. The women in the novel seem to have nowhere near the amount of character that the men have. They are seemingly placed in the work as talking objects who provide adequate but shallow conflicts for the male characters who are so brilliantly portrayed in so many dimensions of thought, emotion, and spirit. Either Hannah is less familiar with the truly primitive characteristics of women and simply evades them in the work, or he simply did not feel as though the true primitive female nature had a place in the thematic design of the work. The closest he came with any of the female characters was Cecilia. With Cecilia's character, the desire for a healthy child that is not fulfilled results in a type of mental and emotional instability that has certainly affected some women in reality. But the remainder of the female characters provide no enlightening commentary on the primitive nature of their sex, nor do they adequately develop as many frames of lust ambition as the male characters so completely do. The female lust ambition is portrayed in the work consistently as a result of some male instigation. With the male characters, we reflect on homosexuality, degradation fantasy, some hints of deeper love, unexplainable incestual desire, feelings of incompetence, competition, adultery, and jilting. With the female characters, we reflect on what? Submission, aquiescence, manipulation, dishonesty. . .moral commentary as opposed to the three-dimensional exploration we're offered by the male characters. So what of the unmentioned facets of feminine primitive lust-- rape fantasy, sensuality, sex and menstruation, homosexuality, power struggle, self-confidence, and the consequences of female sexual freedom? In essence, the work was very successful in what it explored, and should be held in high regard for the issues Hannah was creative and astute enough to handle with style. I simply would have been far more impressed had his characters expressed something other than the male sides of lust: the walrus carried the theme further than any of the women did.

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