SOURCE: "Barry Hannah's Wild West Gunman Seeks a Place Where a Boy Can Roam," in Chicago Tribune—Books, May 26, 1991, p. 3.

In the review below, Coates remarks on Never Die.

There are all kinds of ways to write good fiction. Barry Hannah's way is to kick capital-L Literature in the crotch and make it wail, a lively tradition that dates back at least to Mark Twain. Hannah's real medium is not prose but a kind of hillbilly haiku that proceeds one sentence at a time, sometimes with no apparent connection between them, and adds up to music—heavy on the brass but with a plaintive obligatto of fiddle, banjo and Jew's harp.

Novelist Richard Stern once called Hannah's work "literary jazz," and if we qualify it further as Dixieland, that's probably as close as anyone is going to get. It's no accident that his first book, Geronimo Rex (1971), opens...