this here will be the 1st story from gay for me...there's a couple quotes at the beginning of this one...one from Cormac McCarthy's Child Of God, 1973:were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.so that's where the title comes from, hey? and another from richard "rabbit" brown, james alley blues, 1927:sometimes i think you're just too sweet to diesometimes i think you're just too sweet to dieanother time i think you oughta be buried alive.there is a prologue the dozer took the first cut out of the clay bank below hixson's old place promptly at seven o'clock and by nine the sun was well up in an absolutely cloudless sky and it hung over the ravaged earth like a malediction.the superintendent walked over to a white flatbed truck and leaned his numbered gradepole against it. he filled a pepsi-cola bottle with ice water from a cooler on the truckbed and drank. he took out a red bandanna and mopped his face and throat. behind him the scraped bottomland stretched as far as the eye could see like a dead wasteland, a land no one would have. a blue pall of smoke shifted over it and no tree grew, no flower. a bird would not even fly over it.a swamper named risner came up carrying a widemouth mason jar. its surface was impacted with earth and risner was mopping at it with the tail of his shirt.what'd you find, risner? nice, hey?....the idea of unearthing something...the story opening, moving along...picking up pieces, as the song goes.update, 19 jun 12time & placetennessee, 1952...tiptonville...lake county...ackerman's field...detroit, michigan...breece's variety store...snowwhite cafe...strand theatre...catheys creek...riverside...grinders creek...little rock, arkansas...wild bill's billiards...cane creek...a bar on 26th street in detroit...a street where delancy intersected 114th detroit...eat and run cafe...waynesboro...clifton...the harrikin...wright's place...missouriit's curious, it's a curious thingblackberry winter...never heard ittoad frog winter...perhaps all it is is a smart-aleck remark from the one bloodworth to the other one calling it a blackberry winterthe location of the house...off the road...not accessible by vehicle..."footpath would serve as well, folk who did not acknowledge the invention of the internal combustion engine, to whom the value of the wheel itself was still in question."gay does not bother with the use of quotation marks, he said, she said, that sort of thing. i'd seen this same thing in The Road from Cormac McCarthy...which came first the chicken or the egg. in the road, the lack of quotation marks added tothe flavor of that story. here, it does the same thing, somewhat.splo whiskeyblackberry winter ain't till may...toad frog winter...this second, sarcasm by one bloodworth to the other bloodworth's first"when he flipped it out i was on it like a duck on a june bug."charactersthe bloodworth clanfleming bloodworth, youngest, sort of protagonist, one of manyold mister bloodworth, fleming's great-granddadthe grandfather, elbert, also called e.f. bloodworth (he starts out in little rock)boyd bloodworth, father of flemingbrady, younger brother of boyd and warren bloodworth (in town creek, alabama) another brother of boydjulia...was julia bradshaw, part cherokee, grandmother of flemingcora...in little rock, owns the boarding house where e.f. stays...she works the hospital, the wing where patients were sent to diedee hixsonold man overbey, hubert overbeybrownie, favorite dog of brady bloodworth...dog run over by mailmanjack...name of a german shepherd in detroit where boyd goes in search of his womanthe peddler...boy'd woman ran off w/himcarlton baxter...owns a poolhallmad streetcorner prophetsjunior albrighttut albright, junior's old manmerle...a girl who smucks fleming....stays w/her granddad dee hixson...merle was named after merle oberon, the movie star and she is the wife ofrandyclyde sharpbig shawscrapiron steel...cut off the end of dee hixson's nose, disappearedgene woodall...owner of woodall constructionhis wife...she'd been teaching english when she met gene....mrs. woodall...never given a 1st namecarolyn spiess...one of many girlfriends of gene woodalla felthatted oldtimerclyde edmonds...his arrest by the below allows albright to get a jobcleve garrison, some sort of lawmanfleming's english teacher, kenneth spivey, withered arm...gives him of time and the riveritchy mama bakerharwood...is the mailmanferris walker...one of many who sits itchy mama baker's porchjudge humphreyssharecropper named parnell..."at some uncharted point"...killed wife, 3 children, selfcoble...of coble cattle company, memphis, tennessee, provides a ride to e.f. from little rock"rutgers"...e.f. tells coble this is his namehazel...warren's "accountant"early...a name...dial hollowjuanita, warren's wifeheavyset woman w/a bulldog jaw...replaces harwood, mailsaul bradshaw, julia bradshaw's old man...disliked e.f. bloodworthclyde tennison...local yokelmr. marbet...owns the house that fleming's family rents, although he does not charge rent, has in fact forgotten about the house...that will be under the lake once the t.v.a. dam is builtshelia brewer...and her mythological brotherraven lee halfacre...used to be evelyn but she changed her name...prettiest girl in a three-county areaold mrs. halfacre...a $20 whorealbert...was at the halfacre place when albright & fleming arrivedwidow w/a barn roof needing paint...in a wild area called the harrikinherman tiptoe...a local yokel, myth...a storyearly dial...a moonshinerelise warf...schoolmate of warren's from agoneal bloodworth, cousin of fleming, warren's boy...5 years older than flemingbellwether--sheriffgarrison...one of the porch sitters at the [speak-easy] itchy mama baker'sjimmy de nicholais...works in post officecater hensley...a porch sitter at itchy mama baker'smodine...a woman of warren'sclyde tennison...a name in one of the many stories within this storyideas...things...and such**** just before the end of book one: "the feeling that off somewhere in the bracken man and boy still walked rose in him nor would it abate. with their steps locked in sync with his they paced him in the silent black wood, passed through the boles of trees like revenants."*** "...everyone just half a beat out of sync with everyone else, wandering each alone in the electric dark and any destination reached one just quit by another."*** "...he began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. he felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles."*** fleming visits the place/haunt where parnell did what he did..."trying to divine answers to this old lost mystery, the inevitable why of it, the event that permitted a previously forbidden thought, the impulse that transformed thought back to deed."*** "...here time did not matter. here another set of rules was in order, out of another century."a quotebooks are better if you can share them.update, finished, 20 jun 12, wednesday evening, 9;03 p.m.e.s.t.good read.i'd looked-read-at a few reviews...i think more than one say this has no plot, that the story is not lineal....something something. i disagree. there is a plot, the plot of life and if it is not lineal then our lives are not lineal. these people come alive on the page, warts and all. maybe it's just me...having read so much "southern-lit" gothic or otherwise...but mayhap at times gay is overly conscious of his place. i refuse to call it southern, as gay does not call it that in his story. the place is the hill country of tennessee. although it could be me, it could be me...as there was a time or two when i read a word (or two) (that i should have marked) and wondered...wondered okay...that's either one a beautiful thing or a kind of pretentiousness....local pretentiousness.....the rube making fun of the rube kinda thing...i dunno.anyway, there's a lot of meat and potatoes here, three (four if you count the deceased generations of bloodworths...bloodworms as albright calls fleming in an amusing scene...two friends kidding each other.
William Gay was the son of a sharecropper from Tennessee with an ear for language and love of literature. A blue-collar worker with the soul of a poet, Gay read Thomas Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor when he wasn't painting houses or hanging drywall. Although he wrote for most of his life, his work was continually rejected by the literary scene. Finally, at 58 he published his first novel and the next year a bidding war ensued for Provinces of Night. He died at 70. These hours before first light were merciless. You could not go back to sleep and it was too early to get up and the things you had done or not done lay in your mind immovable as misshapen things you'd erected from stone. There was no give to these hours. They took no prisoners, made no compromises, and the things you had done could not be rationalized into anything save things you had done.Provinces of Night is pure southern gothic, kindling with violence, beauty, and deep insight into the conflicting longings of human nature. It's about the ties of blood and their power to drown, the unforeseen karma of violence that flows far into the future, life (or death) affirming sex, and maybe, sometimes, love. It's about the Bloodworth Family: the grand patriarch E.F., his sons Brady, Boyd and Warren; but it's mostly about 17-year-old Fleming, EF's grandson, abandoned by his parents to fend for himself with little more than a roof over his head and a wood burning stove. Fleming is on his own, but he has a toughness that only deep country can breed and a kindness the men of his family never had. That's the craziest thing I ever heard in my life, his grandmother said. . . If sense was gunpowder, ever one of you men put together wouldn't have enough to load a round of birdshot.The tenaciously self-destructive men and hard rural culture of Provinces reminded me of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone. Fleming embodies a beautifully male version of Dee Rolley with grit born from hardship and an inner moral compass many around him don't seem to have. Life is unforgiving and its lessons hard, but Fleming never utters a single word of self-pity. It doesn't cross his mind. Listen, he said vehemently. Somebody's going to have to say what they really mean and then do what they say they will. All this lying. All this bullshit and pretending. It's just wasting lives, wasting time, everything's just a waste.She looked at him curiously. That's just the way people are. The way the world is. What are you trying to do, fix the world?I don't want to fix the world. Fuck the world. Just the little part of it that I have to live on.This is true literary fiction. It's not plot driven. It's about lives, souls, and what it means to be human. It's about how a young man with the odds stacked against him can possibly learn to survive the soul-shaking brutality and "appalling beauty of life." He had no faith in the permanence of any of this. What he's seen of life had shown him that the world had little of comfort or assurance. He suspected that there were no givens, no map through the maze. Here in falling dark with the world rolling simultaneously toward him and away from him everything seemed no more than random. Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty.William Gay knew a lot about life. While he was fixing houses and earning his daily bread, he was also watching, listening and taking everything in. I want to read everything he wrote, soak in his vision of the world, and hear its music.
What do You think about Provinces Of Night (2015)?
I wish I could be sitting on the porch listening to E.F. play his banjo right now. E.F. is a character not soon to be forgotten, similar to Larry Brown's Wade (see the books "Joe" and "Fay"). Both characters are old men doing scandalous acts - some funny and some not - but unforgettable nonetheless. The Provinces of Night is another excellent book by William Gay. He is soon becoming my favorite. This story encompasses so much that this review will not do it justice. I simply loved it. I loved the characters, the setting, and the language. Gay certainly had a talent with the written word. If I highlighted every sentence that struck me most of the book would be underlined. But what took me most by surprise was the humor which was not as profound in his previous book "The Long Home". There were several parts that had me in tears - literally. My favorite was the disastrous account of Fleming driving Warren and his "accountant". Downright hilarious. I was reading at work and couldn't stop laughing:Now you're catchin on, Warren said. This flat black thing, I think that's what we're supposed to be drivin on. These woods and shit, I believe I'd just try to stay out of them as much as I could.If you're a fan of the Dirty South you need to read William Gay. Thank you Still for graciously sending me your extra copy. I cherished every word and will certainly keep to read again in the future.
—MSJ (Sarah)
My bookshelves runneth over. I was looking at his other books and here is your 5 star review and Mike's 4 . Little Sister Death is getting mediocre reviews on the trail , maybe I'll order this one instead??
—Kirk Smith
This is the second book of William Gay's that I've read (the first was Twilight), and Provinces of Night is every bit as good as Twilight and maybe even better. Sadly William Gay passed away suddenly this past February of an apparent heart attack, but that aside, I'm completely at a loss for why Gay never developed a bigger following. In my opinion, he deserved far more fame and recognition than was given to him. I can't recommend him enough, especially for those who love the southern gothic style of writing. He's constantly compared to Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner, to name a few. And he deserves to be mentioned beside these other great writers of the times...
—Jobie Hughes
