BOOMERANG <i> by Barry Hannah (Houghton Mifflin: $15.95; 150 pp.) </i>

Like a cynic in Elysian Fields, Barry Hannah squirms while working in director Robert Altman’s wooden mansion by the ocean, “a tower of Plexiglas with sea gulls flying around me and the Pacific rolling under house.” Clearly not ready to take in this “white man’s dream of peace,” Hannah, the tough chronicler of Vietnam and marital wars, of violence and lust under the hot Mississippi sun, turns on the radio: “I needed the music, the tinny loud music, to remind me of all the trouble in the world. I wanted to hear how other people hurt too. I could not accept paradise. I had to drag in the bad music and the cigarettes. I had to foul up the air and my ears. With no whiskey, what else was there to talk about?”

Indeed, in “Boomerang,” a fortuitous blend of novel and autobiography, Hannah seems to draw his verve from living on the edge, from “saying ‘yes’ to drugs” (“I had been sober a long time,” his narrator remarks at an Aspen fete with Hunter Thompson and Jack Nicholson, “and thought that was the problem, so like a simple boy who had never had much of it, I sought the cocaine.”), from avoiding those unreflective folks who “sit back in life and have their overview” and scouting around instead “under the bleachers, for an under-view of what life has dropped.”

Hannah might seem an unlikely wanderer, for his writing often celebrates his childhood in the South, the American region where roots and tradition seem to have retained their strongest hold. The rebelliousness that underlies these good-humored pages grows directly out of that time, however, for it is driven by Hannah’s frustration at not being able to carry cherished childhood values into the adult world. “Boomerang” begins with quirky evocations of that golden age, such as picnics of butter-and-sugar sandwiches, fried squirrels and “cowboy salad”: “It was macaroni and cheese and we all would have hated it except Mrs. Bea called it cowboy salad.” Early on, Hannah’s narrator learns the value of peace when a b.b. he fires at a plastic soldier ricochets, chipping his tooth: “At that point I knew the enemy would fire back and I wanted no part of war anymore.”

But in adulthood, Hannah’s likeable (and mostly male) characters have found conflict, especially the conjugal sort, to be inevitable: “All of us have been divorced 12 times and we are looking for the 13th wife.” Playfully riling feminist readers, Hannah affects a chauvinist attitude at times (“It is a cold day in April and my wife has never offered to serve me food. She is on the picket line of feminism”), but at more earnest moments he suggests there are no clear victims or victimizers in the war of the sexes: “My great sullen manliness is controlling her and she has no self-esteem anymore, which is exactly the way I want it. I am a terrible man. Her beauty almost slaughters me. . . . She challenges the thing: the thing . The thing itself.”

Ever the optimist, Hannah’s narrator turns, in mid-narrative, to searching for people who have managed to elude conflict. He finds a tall, bespectacled man scavenging the alleys for beer cans (“The man has dignity. . . . He looks like a man floating on serene thoughts after his immense history of thinking and deciding. He moves along slowly, no hurry. It’s just money, it’s just pennies, it’s just getting by.”), but to his dismay he discovers that the scavenger actually carries a .25-caliber gun: “He’s just as scared as the rest of us,” Hannah laments.

Rather than becoming embittered, though, Hannah ultimately finds camaraderie among society’s outsiders: people, like himself, who feel alienated from pretentious cliques that devalue ordinary folk in their hurry to embrace the latest fad. The targets of Hannah’s “Boomerang” range from literati (one delightfully nasty piece satirizes the effusive and thoughtless praise doled out to one “legend of world literature” whose characters are all “especially stupid, but deep”) to Hollywood fans. “You’re him, ain’t you?,” inquires a man who approaches Hannah on a Hollywood street. “Who?” Hannah asks. “Him, baby.” When the man eventually discovers that Hannah isn’t John Ritter, “the disgust begins accumulating in his eyes.” “You ain’t nobody,” he snarls while walking off.