How can a novel titled Haircuts For The Dead (Mercer University Press, 2025) be an uplifting book? Well, in the lively and literate hands and imagination of William Walsh, it ultimately can be. It is the story of twenty-one-year-old Hannah Gardner as she tries to find a better place for herself, and a better understanding of herself by beginning a personal diary she entitles her Document of Life. At the beginning of Chapter 2, when the third-person narrator first introduces us to Hannah, at twenty-one, we are told:
Hannah Gardner, at twenty-one years old, had grown to be one who sought the truth in all things. She was a pursuer of answers, a yearner, and as she searched, she believed the answers she found in the real world contradicted what she had learned growing up on her family farm and in her Baptist church….Just give it to me straight, she thought.
Hannah would have been more at home with Transcendentalist diarists Emerson and Thoreau, who endeavored to find by journaling “what facts of moment lie in the memory” (Emerson) which might help them to better understand themselves and grow spiritually, than with her own family and society in her small town of Sundown. Yet the Transcendentalists were highly educated; by contrast, the only family member of Hannah’s who graduated from high school is her mother, who is from a rural Kentucky town. Hannah not only wants to better herself, she wishes her family as a whole could be something better. In her senior year, Hannah pays a student on the yearbook staff twenty dollars to add in her twin-brother Lucas, who dropped out in the tenth grade, “Lucas was photoshopped into a tuxedo using his tenth-grade photo.” This creates an unanticipated consequence when the publisher sends a yearbook to Lucas with a “$39.95, plus shipping” invoice, and the reader is treated to one of several absolutely comical examples of redneck idio[t]lect in the novel:
He wrote back on the invoice, “I ain’t never paying 4 this. I did not odor a yearbook. Never wanted 1 in the male. I don’t even go to school at your school. I will be go-in to school at Harvard next spring. See you on the flippitty-flop.” He never heard from them again.
In fact, despite the novel’s serious events and complications, many of its lines and scenes are laced with humor so that it is wonderfully seriocomic, and I believe it contains within its covers three different genres, all three of which have been known, in some of the Western literary canon’s greatest works, to incorporate humor: Bildungsroman (coming-of-age), picaresque, and Rough South.
Hannah Gardner is serious about striving to become a better person, and her Document of Life is a journey of discovery, of both what her past means for her and how she can self-improve for the future. Hannah has a lot of past trauma to process, as told in flashbacks by the third-person narrator, and as relayed to us in Hannah’s first-person Document. Especially notable for this is Chapter 1, “The Fishing Trip,” which is really a preface for the novel, and is a story from when Hannah was six years old. We are introduced to Hannah’s father Darnell Gardner, who wins a free entry into a youth fishing derby by scratching off “WINNER” on an insert in Today’s Fishing Youth Magazine. Darnell’s get-rich-quick scheme is to buy an old 1974 International Travelall wagon, pack his kids in it, drive to Ontario, and himself catch the largest fish and hand it off to one of his children who will then claim the $25,000 prize. He steals the $500 to buy the Travelall from his wife’s Mason jar, money she had saved up “for a new crown and to fill three cavities,” telling her, “You survived this long with those cavities, an’ look, a deal like this don’t come around often.” Lilith, his wife, who is very pregnant with her fifth child, stays behind, as does Hannah, the youngest daughter. Of course, Darnell’s scheme will be a bust, but while he is away, something that will pattern the rest of Hannah’s life occurs. Lilith calls a midwife, Myra, who lives off the farm but whose forebears were slaves on it, to come to her house and perform an abortion. Before the procedure, Hannah is told to go to the living room and watch tv but stays by the kitchen where her now drugged mother is sprawled on a large wooden table. The remarkable skill with which this chapter is written should make it part of any serious Georgia Literature anthology from now on. Hannah gets a blanket from her bed and dozes on the floor, waking later to a baby crying. “She jumped up on the kitchen floor and dropped her blanket around her ankles then dashed over to see her baby sister. It was supposed to be another boy. ‘What’cha gonna name her, Momma?’ Her mother squeaked a reply in Hannah’s ear.” Then, a few lines later:
As the baby cried for oxygen in the new world, Myra walked into the kitchen, held the child by her ankles up over her head, up to the height of the cabinets close to the ceiling, and without hesitation, released the baby. The newborn fell straight down, hitting her head on the stone floor. There was a thunk, then silence. “Girl, hand me that blanket she told Hannah.” Soon, Myra’s husband Grady will tell Hannah, “Come with me.” He shows her how to carry the shovel across her shoulder. “When it gets sore, switch shoulders,” he said. / “Kinda like Jesus?” / “Yeah, something like that.”
After endless walking, Grady digs the grave and puts the bundle in it, then kneels down to Hannah’s face: “You ever tell anyone about this, I’ll toss you in there with that baby. You understand?” Hannah nods. “You best forget this ever happened. You wanna tell someone, tell it to God.” Grady fills the grave and puts three stones on it. Hannah will spend the rest of her twenty-one years searching the woods of the six-hundred-acre Gardner farm for the three stones. When Darnell returns from the fishing trip, more broke than when he left, Lilith tells him the baby came and was stillborn: “I called the county and they came and got him. They took him away.”
As Walsh’s third-person narrator introduces us to the character of young woman Hannah, she is in a very public apostasy with the pastor’s wife in the after-church receiving line. Preacher Town’s wife resists engaging in Hannah’s Socratic Method: “’Why you gotta be like this, always questioning the Word of God?’ Laney scowled.” But Hannah goes on: “Why does God want us to be redeemed? Can’t he just get over it? If we never sinned, there wouldn’t be a need for redemption. It ain’t that complicated.” / “’Look, I’m not going to argue about this,’ Laney growled.” But Hannah continues: “‘Ain’t he supposed to embrace us unconditionally?….And for that matter, I think the Virgin Birth’s a lot of hooey….Did you know that hundreds of ancient cultures had the Virgin Birth long before Christians stole it for their own use?’ / ‘Where’d you hear this Nonsense?’ Preacher Towns asked. / ‘I read it in a book about myths.'”
Hannah’s demonstrance in front of her hometown church marks her parting from organized religion (though the Transcendentalists might have admired it). Her father doesn’t attend church, but hears about it, leaving her a voice mail: “I heard you pissed off the preacher yesterday. You got something on your mind?” Hannah doesn’t answer, but Hannah Gardner has a lot on her mind.
Through Hannah’s Document and the narrator, we get the story of Hannah’s farm, the Gardner farm, which was sold to the Airport Authority in 2019. Hannah begins her diary on a notepad while lying on a big flat rock by the farm’s pond, a beloved space much more sacred to her than the space inside her renounced church. Despite her family’s sale of the farm to the Airport Authority, who in turn sold it, it remains abandoned while its wooden structures continue to fall into disrepair, and its quiet isolation makes it kind of a Walden for Hannah. Much of the diary is about her father Darnell and mother Lilith, whom Darnell was awfully abusive towards, physically, verbally, mentally — to say Darnell is “flawed” as a husband and father would be like calling the Civil War “noteworthy” as a Southern event — as well as about her brothers Lucas and Wendell and sister Greta. There is no shortage of fathers who exert coercive control over their families in Southern fiction. It goes from Caldwell to Conroy in twentieth century Georgia fiction, and continues with William Walsh, as we see here, in the twenty-first. I see Haircuts For The Dead as being in the tradition of the Rough South genre, or as Harry Crews, one of the genre’s “fathers” is purported to have phrased it, “Grit-Lit” (or, even one of the less “literary” monikers like “Trailer-park Gothic”). Historically in Georgia, Rough South is a literature of poor whites, involving from lazy to depraved morals, lavish violence, and often grim humor and painful absurdity (think of the theft of hapless Joy-Hulga’s wooden leg by the con-artist Bible salesman — as he pretends to woo her — in Rough South matriarch Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People”; or, the bold “roping” kidnap of an albino man off his front porch by TyTy and his two boys — to make him use his “ghostly powers” to find where they can dig for gold — in Rough South patriarch Erskine Caldwell’s novel God’s Little Acre). All of the disturbing Rough South elements are prominent in Haircuts. Yet, it is an ultimately, after severe trial, hopeful, even happy book. For comparison in the genre, I am reminded most of Kaye Gibbon’s novel Ellen Foster and her sequel novel The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. Like Hannah, Ellen Foster is trying to process the trauma of growing up with an awful father. Though, where Ellen’s father’s character is completely black — even forbidding Ellen to call for an ambulance when she finds her mother sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her husband and waiting to die, having, after incredible abuse from him, swallowed all her bottle of heart pills one by one — Hannah’s father’s character is more a dark grey. For example, Hannah recalls in her diary a time when her perennially unemployed father actually exerted himself to help her mother:
Momma had surgery once, a double by-pass to repair her malfunctioning heart. When the doctors said she needed surgery, Daddy got a job for three months working nights at The Butler Did It Cleaners. He cleaned offices five nights a week because they had health insurance for the whole family. The day after Momma’s surgery, Daddy quit. I will say this, when Momma was in bed recuperating, Daddy was not as mean as before….At Rent-A-Center, he rented a color TV for her. Lucas and Daddy somehow stole the satellite signal.
At the Susan Kendal Memorial Library, Hannah Gardner makes three discoveries that will be significant for her: she meets Margaret, the Assistant Librarian; working as a hairstylist since she was nineteen, Hannah sees a “Help Wanted” notice on the library’s community bulletin board from Grattan’s Funeral Home for a stylist: “$65 per haircut for women / $45 per haircut for men”; and Hannah finds the text of an historic diary believed to be from the 1850s by an unnamed woman on a wagon trail West from Pennsylvania. Hannah tells us this diary gave her the idea for starting her Document of Life, and Hannah soon begins transcribing the account of the unnamed woman, whom Hannah names “Sarah,” (the name Lilith whispered in six-year-old Hannah’s ear, as we will learn at the end of Haircuts) into her Document — which becomes a hopscotch of paragraphs at times: Hannah’s life/ Sarah’s life/ Hannah’s life, so that the two women almost merge. Hannah and Margaret become close friends, naming the “uptight” Head Librarian Ilene “Elvis,” so that Margaret can tell Hannah when she comes in, in code: “has left the building,” meaning they can relax their behavior, or “still here singing the blues,” meaning they can’t. Hannah likes discussing Sarah’s diary with Margaret in the library breakroom: “‘They caught a guy stealing food from the preacher’s wagon. Suits him right to be kicked off the trail,’ I said. / ‘I wonder what happened to him out there in the wilderness alone?’ Margaret asked me. / ‘They gave him a choice, either leave and be on your own or be turned over to the sheriff in the next town.'” Hannah will inquire about the funeral home job and take it “‘Do I have to touch dead people?’ / ‘You can wear gloves, like a surgeon.’… / Who would complain if I did a terrible job? Hannah thought.” She is barely making it financially, but the new funeral home job, with its higher salary, boosts her sense of well-being. Like Ellen Foster, who scrapes together, over years, $166 to offer to a lady who fosters children to take her in, Hannah is constantly striving to better her situation. Ellen’s foster mother refuses the money, giving it back to Ellen, and takes her in. Ellen’s foster mother never wounds her like all her family except her mama did, but loves her wholly without qualification. In a 1961 article for Vogue Magazine called “Love — In Other Words,” Harper Lee wrote: “Any act of love, however — no matter how small — lessens anxiety’s grip, gives us a taste of tomorrow, and eases the yoke of our fears.” Margaret and Hannah grow closer as friends, and Margaret suggests she could buy a new house and have Hannah as her roommate to help with the mortgage, greatly reducing the amount Hannah currently pays for rent. Hannah accepts. They cook and eat together, decide to sleep in the same room, watch movies together and read books — the more serious ones usually chosen by Margaret — as if picking from a rolodex of recognizable popular and literary culture. The friendship deepens into a Sapphic romance, and the sensitivity of Walsh’s narrative of this development is masterful. This growing love between Hannah and Margaret is what will allow Hannah — allow both of them, in fact — to heal, and it is what will bend the novel away from uncertainty toward hope. Reynolds Price wrote a 1986 essay for The New York Times titled, “Men, Creating Women,” in which he argues it should be natural for writers to create characters opposite the writer’s gender and still reach the “core” of their character to make them believable. However, he admits this facility is easier to theorize than to manifest. He believes the successes have come mostly from men: Tolstoy’s Natasha, Hardy’s Tess, with, notwithstanding Henry James whom he considers the master of this, a bit more success from American women authors, e.g., Ann Tyler, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates. When asked about reviewers’ praise for his own female characters, and questions of “how did you do it,” he says, “My reply was a resort to Flaubert’s famous and true canned answer when asked how he understood Emma Bovary — ‘Bovary is me.'” I bring this up because if Reynolds Price were still alive to read Haircuts, I believe he would consider William Walsh’s effort in this regard notable, maybe even masterful — William Walsh should probably be asked, “How did you do it?”
In Haircuts For The Dead Hannah Gardner’s life rattles and shakes with vicissitude (a lot like Sarah’s does on the grueling trail West). They are too many to enumerate here, but there are several “main highlights.” As already mentioned, she loses her beloved homeplace/ farm because her ne’er do well father can no longer support the family on what his wife Lilith makes cleaning houses, and so finally “cashes in.” When he receives the check for $3,745,000, Darnell doesn’t cash it right away: “He placed it in a small, gold frame that had housed a picture of Hannah’s Memaw, and then he carted the check around to everyone he knew to show off….” Darnell takes the check to show a former boss at Kmart who had fired him after three days: “‘Want to see what Easy Street looks like? It looks like this right here,’ Darnell said, holding the frame over his head like an Olympic medal. ‘Think about that while you’re sittin’ on the crapper.'” When Darnell does decide to deposit the check, at the bank he explodes with rage when Lilith refuses to sign the check to put in their joint account unless Darnell agrees to give her half to put in her own new account. She also makes her signature dependent on his signing divorce papers, which she produces and hands him. The quickly overwhelmed bank security guard calls the sheriff, who hates Darnell, and arrives to ask him, “Having Lady problems?” The bank manager tells Lilith, “You’ll have between $750,000 and $900,000 after taxes but that has to last your entire life. It’s your retirement.” To which the now restrained Darnell says, “Retirement? What the hell’s she gonna retire from? She ain’t never done nothing but clean houses and she’s not good at that.” Darnell will lose his half of the money within a year playing high-stakes poker games around the country in cities like Las Vegas and New Orleans, where he is treated like royalty while he has money. Lilith marries a man she meets at Home Depot and sinks her half of the money into a run-down restaurant he helps her renovate beside Lake Lanier, The Diamond Eye. Lilith offers to pay for Hannah’s apartment for a year after which Hannah will be expected to support herself. Hannah declines her mother’s offer and receives none of the money.
One day when Hannah was eleven, she packed a sandwich in a paper bag and went to search the farm’s woods for her baby sister’s grave. At the edge of the farm where an adjacent property was cleared for a development that was never built (a DNA match causing the developer to be suddenly arrested for his wife’s murder in Kansas City in 1988), Hannah climbs a favorite oak tree. A pickup drives through the clearing to park under the tree. A scared to breathe Hannah watches two men get out with a woman and brutally rape her. Years later on an eleventh-grade trip to a science fair, Hannah’s class stops at a Waffle House where Hannah recognizes the woman who was raped is their waitress: “I had to leave the Waffle House. I just couldn’t bear to stay there with my insides hurting so much. I sat on the school bus, slunk down but looking at her outside my window. I wanted to rush inside and scream, ‘I know what happened!'”
One Thanksgiving Hannah has to watch her father drown her pet pig Wilbur in the pond after Darnell ignores his wife’s asking him to go buy a turkey until the stores are all closed: “Daddy said he had a better idea, ‘We’re gonna have roasted pig this year.’ / At first, I wondered where he was going to get a pig, because we didn’t have any livestock on the farm except Wilbur, our pet.” Darnell’s eureka solution for holiday dinner takes over an hour while the children watch. Wilbur does not want to be drowned. “I wished for Wilbur to pop to the surface squealing and Daddy bobbing up, floating face down in the water and staring at the bottom like something down there was intriguing, like maybe he’d found Atlantis.” Eventually Darnell does drag Wilbur out dead and takes him to the barn and slaughters him, but the ordeal lands Darnell in bed for two weeks with pneumonia. The gruesomely absurd event gives Hannah two weeks of the happiest times in their house that she can remember.
Through all of this, though, Hannah has a resiliency, a vibrancy, an attitude which evokes other characters and novels — Candide, Huck and Jim — where a reader has the sense that this character will survive. I think in this sense Haircuts is like a picaresque novel. In the traditional Spanish picaresque, the picaro — if male — or in Hannah’s case, picara, is a protagonist who is resilient, clever, and does what is necessary to survive. The only time in the novel Hannah is almost “drowned” is after her encounter with the novel’s villain, Hawkshaw Bales. If “Hawk” suggests “predator,” that is surely intentional. Hannah encounters Hawkshaw Bales while alone at Lucas’s trailer. Bales, a local criminal, is parked outside in a Lexus when Hannah steps out of the trailer. Bales gets out and tells her, “Your brother owes me ten thousand dollars, and I’m here to collect.” To which she replies: “Lucas doesn’t have ten dollars to his name, let alone ten thousand. Take a look around. See that beat-up Oldsmobile? That’s all he owns, an’ it doesn’t run.” Bales, a muscular six feet two inches of hypermasculinity, never takes “no,” or “I don’t know,” as an answer from anyone. Hannah fires whip-snap rejoinders to everything he says or asks. Unfortunately for Hannah, Bales is intrigued by this spunky, slight female. Bales snatches her purse, looks at her address on her license, and types his number into her phone and calls himself. Hannah’s girl-power attitude and hot-lead words are defenseless against this, but she comes away from the encounter believing she has won: “‘Hannah, give me a call. I have your number, so maybe I’ll call you.’ / ‘Don’t bother Mr. Pushy. Besides, you’ll just lecture me about street names.’ / Bales chuckled, and as he walked away, said, ‘You sure don’t like anyone telling you what to do.’ / ‘Who Would?'” Hannah will underestimate Hawkshaw Bales’ depraved nature, and in an attempt to protect her brother Lucas will face Bales with her attitude of bravado again to her grave detriment — yet, in the end, all will be well. Like villain Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, one of Charles Dickens’ great picaresques, Hawkshaw Bales will turn the plot in Haircuts For The Dead, but also like in Oliver Twist, fate will turn it back against him, and good will prevail. The Rough South milieu is often a “survival of the meanest.” Mississippi writer Larry Brown said in a 1991 interview: “Whatever good is in this world has to have teeth in it if evil will be dealt with.” Hannah is the strongest member of her family, and has no real power against Bales’ evil, but in the end she will actually gain something from it and him. Because of someone’s brief encounters with Hannah’s goodness, a deus ex machina will come to her aid like a Destroying Angel right out of a Stephen Hunter novel. Bales will not know what hit him, and Hannah and Margaret will never know who hit him, but they will be freed to have a happy and fulfilling life together.
Mikhail Bakhtin said, “A genre lives in the present, but remembers the past.” I think Haircuts for the Dead lives in the twenty-first century but remembers and continues Georgia’s literary past. Can a seriocomic novel be great? Well, I think Haircuts For The Dead is more serious than Faulkner’s picaresque novel The Reivers, which after all won a Pulitzer — and was Faulkner. I highly recommend William Walsh’s Haircuts For The Dead.
Steven Croft’s book reviews have appeared in Southern Literary Review, Synchronized Chaos, Misfit Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, and other places. An Army combat veteran, he lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia.