Desperate Measures by James Hannah (review)

Reviews 69 Anglos. Candelaria revealed his sympathetic understanding of these themes in his early novel, Memories of the Alhambra, but his short stories are especially successful in their probing of human emotions and vulnerability. There is joy and hope and endurance in his characters, too, and these positive values are often contrasted with loneliness and the fear of death, as in “Kissing the Gorilla” and “Affirmative Action.” This latter story is one of the best in the collection, with its touching treatment of the frustrations of old age in the widowed Hispanic grandmother Rosalia. Her discovery of an unexpected ally and kindred spirit in her feisty, Irish granddaughter-in-law gives a refreshingly optimistic twist to the eternal conflict between generations. Candelaria’s continuing concern with generational and ethnic differences is evident in this selection, and his solutions, as in the case of “Affirmative Action,” often make us stop to reconsider our own preconceptions and priori­ ties. Human relationships will always be conflictive, for that is our nature; but Candelaria seems to suggest that they need not be negatively so. If we must shoot our John Waynes, Candelaria shows us how to do so without hurting each other. PATRICIA DE LA FUENTE Pan American University Desperate Measures. By James Hannah. (Dallas: Southern Methodist Uni­ versity Press, 1988. 195 pages, $14.95.) A collection of ten short stories in the Southwest Life and Letters Series, Desperate Measures speaks with urgency about characters in extreme situa­ tions. Although there is no story called “Desperate Measures” in Hannah’s collection, the title theme is dominant. The stories are almost all set in Texas (two show us Texans on journeys out of the country),but the situations might occur anywhere; their southwestern locale seems incidental to the pain and suffering of the characters, who take measures but find no remedies. In the lead story, “Auto-da-fe,” a young wife survives the physical and mental abuse of her husband, who is bent on their destruction. Fire is his ele­ ment, and in his desperation he resembles creatures in the work of Flannery O’Connor: “She [the wife] sat on the porch’s edge and watched Steven dance beyond the ring of heat, his arms raised over his head, waving his hands like some Pentecostal full of the Holy Ghost.” But O’Connor’s moment of divine grace or revelation is missing from this drama, as it is from the other stories. There are, however, lingering religious echoes from several of Hannah’s char­ acters as they search for their remedies. In “Junior Jackson’s Parable” the lead character is even more in an O’Connor mold: “Everybody [Junior tries to 70 Western American Literature convince himself] always understood something. Everything fit together and made sense at the end. Explained the car wreck, the alcoholic’s whipping his wife, the sparrow falling from the sky. That and them parables. The Good Samaritan finally helped that hurt guy; the prodigal son’s daddy fixed a feast for him. Everything sorted itself out. A whole lifetime of sin, uselessness, bad luck was cleared up, explained, paid for, worked out in a minute flat.” Junior does not find the revelation that O’Connor gives to Hazel Motes of Wise Blood whom Junior resembles in many ways, but the reader surely feels Junior’s frustration. Hannah’s strength is in his portrayal of desperation, and frequently death arouses the characters’ sense of helplessness. In “Slset,” perhaps the tenderest of the stories, a retired couple works to come to terms with the death of their son in Vietnam and the unhappy marriage of their daughter. The penultimate story, “Hello to Hello,” one of the most Texan of the stories, portrays a funeral, an event that helps clarify the dynamics of a family and a marriage. Repeatedly, the desperation that Hannah presents is in a family or mari­ tal context. The distances between people are usually pronounced, as in “Auto-da-fe.” Divorce is a defining ingredient of the action in two of the stories—-“Three Houses” and “Reefs.” In the first, the woman maintains the fiction that she is living in the house she in fact vacated when her marriage...