Rude Noises: CAPTAIN MAXIMUS

Fiction once provided a stomping ground for the crazed or eccentric. When the ideal of civilized behavior combined decorum and good manners, books could offer an escape into the manias of Heathcliff, Ahab and Raskolnikov, or into the stubborn individualism of Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. Heroes and heroines who would surely disrupt any public society could be avidly followed in private. But as daily life grows more clamorous and abrasive, as violence enters the home regularly by way of TV or flesh-and-blood carriers, serious fiction shows signs of moving in the opposite direction. Novels and story collections tumble off the presses, filled with sensitive college graduates who would not harm a fly. Male characters wonder what it means to be men. Female characters wonder what it means to be women. Sometimes, in moments of high drama, the sexes notice and ponder the mysteries of one another.

Against this background of gentle murmurings, Author Barry Hannah, 43, persists in making rude noises. Captain Maximus, his sixth book and second collection of stories, is full of spite, rage, booze and unregenerate boorishness. Not one of Hannah's two-fisted protagonists or narrators would perform well at a dinner party or charity bazaar. They resist gentrification. They hang around in scuzzy bars, wallowing in anarchic musings: "I thought of my books, my children, and the fact that almost everybody sells used cars or dies early. I used to get so angry about this issue that I would drag policemen out of their cars."

Such a statement intentionally blurs the line between truth and bravado. Hannah's speakers, Southerners almost to the man, habitually treat language as action, words as deeds. Roger Laird, the hero of Getting Ready, worries over his many and expensive failures to catch "a significant fish." Finally, some 30 miles south of Panama City, he manages to haul in a sand shark from the surf. Though it lacks the grandeur he had imagined, this experience proves exhilarating enough to lead him to his life's next great task. He moves to Dallas, builds a pair of 8-ft. stilts and wades around a local lake, screaming obscenities at the rich people in boats motoring by. The narrator of Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter also finds himself in Texas, which offends him: "Dallas, city of the fur helicopters. Dallas--computers, plastics, urban cowboys with schemes and wolf shooting in their hearts." He hops on his black motorcycle and heads back to where he belongs: "The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl."