SOURCE: "Stolen Loves, Manly Vengeance," in The New York Times Book Review, November 1, 1987, p. 26.

Edwards is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he asserts that Hey Jack! pales in comparison to Hannah's earlier works.

Since his first novel, Geronimo Rex, won the William Faulkner Prize and a National Book Award nomination in the early 1970's, Barry Hannah has been a leading contender for Southern novelist of his generation. Every generation seems to want a Southern novelist of its own; there was Faulkner himself, and then Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy and various other successors and claimants. But now there are not a lot of Southern novelists left. Regional writers are supposed to stay put, more or less, and over the last two or three decades Southern-born talent has tended to leave home, to search in Europe or New York or elsewhere for...