Bad Boy

By P.G.

RAY

by Barry Hannah

Knopf; 113 pages; $7.95

The hero of this deft assemblage is a doctor who practices in Tuscaloosa, Ala. What he practices, chiefly, is high-spirited swinishness. Ray dispenses morphine and other controlled substances to patients who are his friends; he also lends his friendly nurse to some of them. On the other hand, he pulls the plug on a cranky old man who annoys him. Unsteadily launched on his second marriage, Ray fools around with a succession of compliant women, while visions of high-heeled nudes out of Penthouse dance in his head. He looks back longingly to his days as a fighter pilot in Viet Nam: "The only glory I see is the glory I saw as a jet fighter." Ray is, in short, an extremely bad good ole boy.

Author Barry Hannah, 38, is also a connoisseur of the rundown, the tacky, the disreputable. Observes one wastrel: "My pappy's from Mississippi. He ain't worth nothing, but there he is." Pretty much the same thing can be said about Ray himself. Hannah is talented enough to make his hero's uninhibited meanness sympathetic and humorous. Ray says things that most people only think, at low moments: "I get tired of people. All of them driving around in their cars, eating, having to be." But unrelieved rascality can grow boring, and this short novel ends not a page too soon.

--P.G.

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