Customer Reviews

The Long Home

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Shot whiskey is the type that so strong and just plain nasty that throwing it down your throat in a (hopefully) single swallow is the only way to imbibe it and survive. Sippin' whiskey, on the other hand, while still packing a punch, is more artfully crafted, with all sorts of artful nuances there to savor - you want to take your time with it, so you can more fully appreciate the care with which it was made. William Gay's prose is sippin' whiskey - there's a strength within that will leave you reeling, but there are so many subtleties to be found as well.

His characters are vivid and believable, and he brings them to life slowly, rather than burying the reader in a swamp of description. We get to know them as we would a person in our day-to-day lives, through their actions, conversations, and what thoughts they might care to share with us - it's an experience that makes reading this novel all the more precious and amazing. The descriptions that occur within these pages are subtle as well - his vocabulary is astonishing, and when he can't find a suitable word already in general usage, he constructs one (always to good advantage). Time after time, reading this incredible novel, I found myself going over a passage again and again, to make sure that I wasn't imagining the creative powers at work here.

Gay's literary gifts are amazing - but he never uses them in such a way as to overpower his characters. The novel is set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s - and that time and place is firmly established within the first few pages. I felt transported as I read it. Gay lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee - and his knowledge of the area and the people, and his obvious empathy toward them, give his fiction a sense of reality that is both gentle and ferocious.

Dirt farmers, laborers, bootleggers, lawmen (both honest and crooked), women and men old before their time, young people aching for something - anything - more than what they see around them, what they see as their future if they remain where they are. The story here is basically an old one - that of an evil presence in the midst of normalcy, ignored or tolerated by most of the citizens in the area, that slowly establishes itself as a power not to be questioned without dire retribution. What's the old saying? `Absolute power corrupts absolutely' - the mighty tend to fall mighty hard, and they seldom see it coming. The evil character in this novel - one Dallas Hardin, bootlegger, honkytonk operator, would-be pimp and many more unsavory occupations - is one of the most memorable baddies I've come across in some time. The evil within him is made palpable - you can feel it in the air, it will make your skin crawl - by William Gay's skill.

I've already started reading his second novel, and I've got my eye on his collected short stories as well. Gay's work was recommended to me by another author - and it's a recommendation for which I'll be grateful for a long, long time. This is high magick.

I read this book with an increasing sense of wonder and awe. William Gay has written a moving, heartbreaking novel with people I believe and believe in, with language both poetic and taut, with detail to die for, with humor and wisdom and heart and darkness and a sense of place you might read a thousand books and never find. Buy this book and wrap it in Mylar and stand it on the shelf with your Faulkner and your Cormac McCarthy, and then take it down and start reading it over again. We all keep hearing about the next new voice in American fiction. Well folks, William Gay is a whole varied chorus of voices, all singing in perfect harmony. The song is dark, god yes, but you can't stop listening.

When an Author can open a work with massive explosions from deep within the Earth that leave behind a gaping black pit that smells of brimstone, and not make the portrayal absurd, it is a reasonable presumption that you have the work of great storyteller in your hands. And this is certainly the case with Mr. William Gay and his work, "The Long Home".

The story contains elements and actions that you have read before, the conflict between good and bad/evil, fear that prevents proper conduct, revenge and redemption, all are not unfamiliar ground. However, Mr. Gay makes his own mix of these elements and creates a story that is his and not just another derivative knockoff. From the explosive pit that becomes both a crypt and a pathway that delivers what will be the truth, to the evil player with the yellow eyes of a goat, the Author definitely sets his story as a battle between opposing forces with Capital Letters.

The story, which is set in Tennessee, is not the typical slow motion trek through the oppressive heat of the South. That may seem like a minor point, but it is indicative of the Author's attention to detail and a portrayal that is not what is generally expected. He embeds the evil character with the appropriate darkness by sharing the story of his birth, which is anything other than routine, and perhaps not for the squeamish.

The book has a great cadence as the Author unfolds his story at a pace that varies and is consistent with the level of tension and movement of events that unfold. The book provides all the suspense and conflict a book of this genre requires but it does not become contrived in an effort to make you race through the pages. Events unfold with credibility, and the results when unwound are credible as well.

This is the first work for this Author, however he has a new work out, and it will be added to my reading list.

I first read William Gay's work in the Missouri Review a year or so ago, a beautiful, original story that still haunts me. I couldn't wait for his first novel to appear, and I took The Long Home with me on a seven-hour flight. The hours flew by, so absorbed was I in the characters springing up off the page. A wonderful book by an author I hope to see much more of.

The title of this review may seem pretentious, but, as an author, I rejoice in the literary art of story-telling at it's highest level. Mr. Gay, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Nashville at The Southern Festival of the Book, is a masterful story-teller. His characters are lively and real. The inner-workings of the mind and the tenacity of the southern male are reborn in this tale. Though some critics have said his work is Faulknerian in tone, Mr. Gay's prose is far more readable and, in my opinion, lyrical. His love for the area and the people about which he writes are reminiscent of Pat Conroy and his attachment of South Carolina's Low Country. Congratulations to William Gay for a job well done.

A southern novel has never pulled me in like this before. I needed something to read and I was at a friend's house. I asked her what her favorite book on her bookshelf was and she gave me this one. I'm glad she did. The writing is so powerful, and so lyrical, that I could not put it down. Beyond that, the sentences are so rich, bursting with information, that no pages could be skipped. This is a story about the deep south, before everyone had telephones and automobiles, set in a remote area of Tennessee, a place with its own history and its own rules. You will not regret reading this book.

This man paints pictures in your head. Some people write books, some people tell stories and a select few can totally capture your imagination. With a fluid, easy style, William Gay, in his debut novel, falls into the last category. Set in Tennessee in the 1940s, I was transported to a time and place I've never been, yet it felt so familiar. I definitely want more of the same. Keep 'em coming please.

The battle of good versus evil is woven through three-dimensional characters, young and elderly. Remorseless murderer Dallas Hardin worsens with age, stealing another's wife and trying to prostitute her daughter. Young Nathan Winer, whose father Hardin killed when the boy was very young, violently objects. Elderly William Tell Oliver knows secrets and knows exactly how to help Winer. The unhurried climax literally tightened my nerves until the most satisfying end. --Roy L. Fish, author of short stories and the suspense novel, ICEMAN.

William Gay has managed what few authors ever have: reduce me to tears with the prayer-like beauty of his language. There isn't a dead word or flat sentence on any of this book's pages. I await his next novel as I've awaited no other before it.

WOW! This story will wake you up. Filled with hard people who want something, it is told with beauty and horror and you can never assume anything. The characters are written so well I felt as if they were looking at me as I read about their tragedies. It is a telling of 'almost hope' and 'almost light'. I hope William Gay writes many more stories.