Hannah, Barry. The Tennis Handsome. New York: Knopf, 1983.

Pretty sure this novel came from one of Hannah's stories in Airships. Chapter One may be the story reprinted in its entirety. The gist of it all goes like this: French Edward is not only an incredibly good tennis player, but he may also be the most gorgeous man alive. Various things happen to him throughout the novel to debilitate his mind such that he's all body. He's like the body personified, which sounds off, but follow me here. Surrounding him are Dr. Word, Edward's high-school coach who may or may not be "queer," and Captain Bob Smith, a fellow townsman who saw a lot of shit in Vietnam. Also, Dr. Baby Levaster, a doctor and philanderer who ends up being the brain to Edward's body.

This was what attracted me to the book, this way that Hannah separates attributes so fully into two characters. It's kind of like Twins, the movie, but not. Levaster doesn't have the best mind in the world. Plus typing it out like this makes me feel like I'm pro eugenics. I'm not. I just think the concept is romantic. Or at least it suits our romantic notions that the brilliantly gorgeous can't be gorgeously brilliant, that such a thing would be unfair, and that as a result, we love to watch and follow flawed beauty, people who are beautiful and beautifully dumb—celebrities, really.

Hannah is so good. It's a shame that he's apparently stopped writing. Look at this:

Three minutes into the brawl, the Nuclear Physics Brothers had isolated a single Twin and were blinding him with their thumbs. The other Twin, eaten up by distress, waited honorably outside the ring, untagged. The referee was rendered impotent by the deceptions of the Brother. Finally, the sighted Twin, his honor exasperated totally, leapt into the ring with a chair in his hands and broke it—this balsa prop—over both heads of the Brothers, routing all their wicked science. The referee, himself fraudulently wounded, tried to restore order but could not. This was the thing most beloved. A profound and blissful howling of the crowd. This time the blinded law allowed the rage of the good to run wild. The Brothers were dismantled and at last were pitched out of the ring altogether, retreating with a craven petulence, citing the rules, smacked by a rain of peanuts and balled cups, hurling back their own weak, faggoty imprecations (124, italics added).

So either Hannah has read his Barthes, or he's just wise enough to get at the whole suffering/defeat/justice triad of professional wrestling in ways more comic and immediate. It's not just really good wrestling writing, is what I also want to say here.

But there's that "faggotty," which kinda fits, and but lots of stuff on the part of the narrator (3rd-person, mostly) about queers and even darkies. What does a 21st-century reader do with this? Like, "Some casual darkie, alone on the levee, playing his tonette, may have seen a weird roil in the Big Muddy, a rolling of bones and cloth shreds" (133), or "Some bigger, bossier queers came in, all dressed up and sullen" (135). This book is only 20 years old. I'm not calling Hannah a bigot. I'm dumb enough to know that an author and a narrator aren't the same person. I may want to call it nihilistic, a nihilistic outlook on the world. Because using such terms shows a lack of respect, or respectability, on the part of the narrator, and its being universally applied (women, men, Yankees, southernersѿnone are safe) makes me read this book as taking place in a universe where what's valued is whatever's on. Whatever's up. Baby Levaster is the guy we spend the most time with, and he's terribly selfish and yet such a romantic. But his romantic feelings are nearly all physical, and none involve any real respect for another person.

I'm rambling. This is a book about, and propelled by, beauty. And reading it has made me even prettier.