Some experiences in life are said to be like no other...wholly unique...one of a kind. Things that we're told are in this category include visiting the Taj Mahal in India, actually being in the same room with Michelangelo's "David", witnessing the birth of child, and bungee jumping. To this list of once-in-a-lifetime participations, you can pretty safely add reading Barry Hannah's volume of stories, Airships. I kid you not; this book is a virtual genre unto itself, completely unlike anything you're likely to read before or after. Sample this quote from the story "Water Liars" and see if your curiosity is piqued. The scene: some good old boys are hanging out on a dock, swapping tall tales:

I find two quotes, in particular, very helpful in understanding Hannah. The first is from the author, himself, from an interview in The Mississippi Review (1996): "Those that don't avert their eyes are the real artists." This man most assuredly practices what he preaches! The second is from Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book. They counsel: "...don't criticize imaginative writing until you fully appreciate what the author has tried to make you experience." This is a paramount dictum for reading Hannah, for dissecting and examining experience is what these stories are all about. Readers looking for Big Themes, Major Statements, and Grand Proclamations About Human Nature are going to be disappointed.

One of Hannah's greatest strengths is the ability to get to the heart of very difficult feelings, complicated emotions and desires. He is often able to crystallize, in a solitary sentence, what it might take another a whole page to describe. He is also able to mirror the rash, headlong character of life's unexpected twists and turns by suddenly bringing a story (or an episode within a story) to a precipitate end—curt and merciless. It's a device analogous to taking your car around a sharp turn only to unexpectedly encounter a dead end. "Water Liars", for instance, has as its final paragraph the single sentence: "We were both crucified by the truth." In the very last breath of "Coming Close To Donna", we learn the narrator is a murderer. The final paragraph of "Testimony of Pilot" is, again, a lone oration: "That is why I told this story and will never tell another."

By Airships' own internal standards of lunacy, the three paragraphs quoted above are, on a scale of 1 to 10, about a 5. (You'll stare in disbelief at the first two paragraphs of "Quo Vadis, Smut?", blink your eyes, re-read them, and pinch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming.) We can't help but crack up at the way Hannah has this desperately inarticulate man tell his story; but, at the same time, we understand how painful and shocking it was for him. Hannah constantly uses wild comedy—in some highly literary prose—to reveal the gaping, open emotional wounds of his characters. In the best of these tales, people arrive at fragile, tentative avenues of empathy with one another because each has arrived at his/her private sort of peace. That empathy would, otherwise, be impossible.

This is exactly what happens in "Water Liars". The story is told (these are almost all first person narrations) by a gentleman who has recently learned that his wife had a few lovers before they were married—indeed, before they even met. The acquisition of this knowledge disturbs him greatly, but he is at a loss to understand the irrational stabs of jealousy (and he recognizes them as irrational). All he knows is that he has the feeling. He says of the man who told the story, in the excerpt above, "You could see he had never recovered from the thing he had told about", and "We were kindred", and, finally, "We were both crucified by the truth." Notice: not Truth, with a capital T, but plain old ordinary truth, simple facts about loved ones. This unites people, this recognition that others have come to terms with their truths—whether sad and painful or joyous and exhilarating. Our internal software registers the recognition, almost like birds recognizing the plumage in the feathers of other birds. I might not be so understanding of how you feel about hearing your daughter making wild love in the marshlands, screaming like "the Yazoo", if I weren't so distraught and upset, myself, about my wife's ex-lovers.

Plenty of the stories, here, fall into two recognizable genres: war stories and stories about relationships. Hannah is intensely interested in both the Civil War and the Vietnam War. The Civil War stories are all preoccupied with Jeb Stuart, a well-known Confederate general. He appears in several. In the best of these, "Dragged Fighting From His Tomb", Hannah creates a tour de force of the imagination, of literary art, and of historical storytelling. As "Dragged Fighting" opens, Stuart makes a disastrous decision to raid a Union stronghold in Pennsylvania. His army is destroyed. The narrator of the story takes a bullet in the throat; as he waits to die, his head is "a calm green church". In spite of the terrible mishap, he doesn't die but, in fact, lives to assassinate Jeb Stuart in revenge—a horrible act of treason against the South. We suddenly rocket forward thirty-five years, to a retirement home in Miami in 1900, in the sort of accelerator pedal move Hannah likes to make and to which I alluded earlier. The narrator is now in a rest home; someone recognizes him as Stuart's killer. The witness, telling the complete truth, is believed by no one. The narrator observes, "The only friends of the human sort I have are the ghosts that I killed. They speak when I am really drunk."

On the domestic front, "Our Secret Home" really puts married life under the microscope—albeit with the trademark macabre Hannah twists. A couple gives a party; the wife orders some horrible fish hors d' oeuvres. The husband remarks, "I looked over at the long table of uneaten fish tasties. The heat had worked on them a couple more hours now and had brought them up to a really unacceptable sort of presence." In "Love Too Long": "Nothing in the world really matters but you and your woman. Friendship and politics go to hell." The story "Behold The Husband In His Perfect Agony" is from such a different vista of perspective, I barely know how to comment on it. It has to be read, to be experienced!

Airships succeeds so greatly, in part, because it is so unpredictable. Even the three or four stories that seem to misfire badly are interesting for this reason. Hannah is the least formulaic writer imaginable. (It's interesting to note that Robert Altman once hired him for the sort of writing that is most formulaic of all—that of penning screenplays for film—and Hannah is said to have hated the work.) If you want to see how a really interesting, wholly original, different kind of mind looks at the world, this volume is certainly one way to do that.