Provinces of Night: A Novel [Paperback]

William Gay (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 9, 2002

It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his second novel, Provinces of Night, William Gay re-creates the oppressive, evocative atmosphere of the American Deep South that he first explored in his debut novel, The Long Home. Against the backdrop of rural Tennessee in the 1950s, our teenage protagonist, Fleming Bloodworth, finds himself alone in the family home after his father, Boyd, abandons him to hunt down and kill his wife's lover. At the same time, Fleming's grandfather decides to return to his family after 20 years of self-imposed exile. He returns to discover that his remaining two sons, Warren and Brady, are in turn an alcoholic womanizer and a Bible-quoting fantasist who enjoys putting curses on his enemies.

This is a self-consciously big novel in the Southern tradition that could easily have buckled under the weight of its own ambition. Instead, Gay pulls it off with ease, presenting us with a stream of unforgettable characters. While the central themes of love, loyalty, and forgiveness are explored seriously and sensitively, the finely wrought prose is also sprinkled with moments of genuine humor as Gay proves that he's not afraid to gently mock his gang of Southern eccentrics. This is a wonderful novel and a worthy successor to the tradition it so obviously admires. --Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Like one of Wallace Stevens's best-known poems, Gay's (The Long Home) second novel begins with a jar on a hill in TennesseeDonly this one appears to contain tiny human bones. That's a suitably ominous prelude to the dark saga of the Bloodworth clan, which revolves mostly around 17-year-old Fleming, an aspiring writer trying to evade the family legacy of violence and self-destruction. It is 1952 and his father, Boyd, has left their decrepit mountain home "seventy miles back of Nashville" for Detroit, not to work in an automobile factory like the other "hillbillies" but to search forDand killDthe peddler who has run off with his wife. Meanwhile, Fleming's grandfather, E.F. Bloodworth, a blues musician, is on his way home after having suffered a "stroke of paralysis" 20 years earlier. His handsome Uncle Warren, a former war hero now at loose ends, is a dissipated womanizer with an even more dissolute and unstable son, and his Uncle Brady "witches" for water, tells fortunes and casts hexes on those who do him wrong. Even as the Tennessee Valley Authority is moving in to clear and flood their valley and bring in "the electricity," Fleming's relatives and neighbors live by the backwoods code of violence exemplified by E.F., a man whose exploits are legendary among the locals. Only Raven Lee Halfacre, the 16-year-old daughter of a promiscuous alcoholic and the "prettiest girl in a three county area," offers the boy a glimpse of another way of life. Fleming's name echoes that of one of Faulkner's most memorable characters, and Gay's prose resembles that of Faulkner at his most florid. His stylistic quirksDespecially his refusal to set off dialogue with quotation marksDtake some getting used to, but the pitch-perfect rendition of the cadences of Southern speech and deeply poetic descriptions of the landscape more than compensate. (Dec. 26)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (April 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385499280
• ISBN-13: 978-0385499286
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #251,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Voice of the South December 27, 2000

By Harry

Format:Hardcover

Finding THE LONG HOME powerful and fun to read, I was excited to get my hands on this, Mr. Gay's new novel. PROVINCES OF NIGHT exceeded my expectations. Fleming Bloodworth and his grandfather E. F. make an extrodinary pair, the former finding pain and love and bursting with a desire for life (yet with enough wisdom to learn from the latter), and the old man who's come home to find...something, even he's not sure what. A host of eccentric characters round out this work, from a bitter son who casts spells on his enemies, to the funniest adolescent since Cormac McCarthy's Harrogate in SUTTREE. Having grown up with stories of the south, I found Gay's details rich and true. He seems to be writing for himself, drawing on personal stories, humorous experiences and pain and reminds me of other great writers, Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway to name two. I look for an honest voice in fiction and I have certainly found one in William Gay. He is one of the unsung heroes of southern fiction - hell, of fiction period, and he's only written two novels. Here's to many more tales told by this astonishing author.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Goes Down Real Easy February 16, 2001

By J. Mullin

Format:Hardcover

When I read William Gay's very impressive debut novel The Long Home a few months ago on a recommendation, I thought he was a promising southern writer, reminiscent of Faulkner. His tale of evil moonshiners, crooked cops, racists and injustice was a refreshing change of pace from most contemporary fiction. Now, with his latest masterpiece Provinces of Night, I am starting to believe Gay may be the most talented writer living in the South today. This book is simply astonishing, at times brutal and at other times tender and poetic, but always enjoyable.

The story involves the Bloodworth family, including banjo-picker E.F., who left his young wife and sons twenty years earlier to chase his musical dreams, and to get away from the aftermath of a violent shootout. E.F. has decided to return home, to a valley about to be buried under a lake by the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1952, as the nation enters the Korean War. Bloodworth's grown sons Warren (a womanizing alcoholic), Boyd (who is compelled to chase down his adulterous wife and her lover) and Brady (who still lives at home and places hexes on enemies for revenge or profit) are not exactly waiting with open arms. It is only Boyd's 17 year old son Fleming, E.F.'s grandson, who seems to care what happens to the old man upon his return.

Fleming is the true heart and moral center of the novel. His odd relationship with his wandering dad, his blossoming romance with young Raven Lee, his tense tolerance of uncles Brady and Warren and his bonding with E.F. are skillfully woven around numerous effective and often-times humorous subplots. I loved the adventures of Fleming's buddy Junior Albright, who accidentally breaks some machinery after conning his way onto a jobsite as a roofer, with serious and far reaching consequences. I also loved the manic roadtrip with Warren and his "accountant", as well as Fleming's alcoholic cousin. The plot never really slowed down to a halt, and Gay manages to keep several balls in the air without missing a beat. Fleming did remind me a little of idealistic young Nathan Winer of The Long Home, and Raven Lee seemed a bit similar to Amber Rose of the prior novel (both are young dark beauties raised in a setting that is anything but innocent), but who cares, I enjoyed their adventures anyway.

Perhaps the best part of the novel, for me, was Gay's prose style. He has a way of setting the scene, depicting the family sitting on a porch listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio with the Tennessee hills turning purple at sunset, that swept me away every time I picked up the book. There are no quotation marks in the novel, instead Gay curiously weaves the dialogue into the paragraphs, so you oftentimes find yourself re-reading passages once you realize a character is speaking. This started out as a mild distraction, but I came to enjoy the technique after awhile. Quite simply, Gay is a master storyteller, his dialogue is pitch perfect, and his descriptions, while not overly verbose or flowery, never fail to effectively set the stage. You want to read slowly and savor every drop of his writing, like sipping a fine Kentucky bourbon (as his characters are wont to do). I don't know what Mr. Gay has been up to previously, he apparently started writing novels later in life, but I hope he keeps putting out these excellent novels of Tennessee, this reader can't wait for the next one.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars AMAZINGLY GOOD WRITING... November 12, 2002

By Larry L. Looney

Format:Hardcover

When I read William Gay's first novel, THE LONG HOME, recently, I had the strong feeling that I had discovered the work of someone very special - and reading PROVINCES OF NIGHT has confirmed that for me. Gay writes with a carefully and languidly - the breadth and depth of his writing demands full attention from the reader, and the rewards are great indeed.

The above-mentioned languid quality of his work does not for a single moment indicate any sort of laziness on his part - writing this good can, of course, come from the foundation of a natural talent, but it takes hard and diligent work to come up with a finished product of this quality. Gay's characters are vivid and real, and they are built up slowly - the reader is required to get to know them, rather than having them dumped off the page and into their lap. His descriptive abilities are astonishing as well - if there isn't a word that suits the image he's trying to get across, he's not above combining existing words into a single unit, and he does so with taste, style and intelligence. There are no cheap, easy gimmicks at work here - just talent and imagination.

Set in the same small rural Tennessee town in which his earlier novel takes place - but in the 1950s this time, as opposed to the 1940s - Gay captures the setting and characters with absolute perfection. His country folk are depicted honestly - they are uneducated, to be sure, and some of them are certainly not the brightest match in the box, but he treats them with respect. They come across as honest and real - the figures of speech they employ might seem odd to city dwellers, and their knowledge of the world outside of their area ranges from non-existent to a shadowy grey awareness that is tempered liberally with misinformation and rumor. They look upon outsiders with doubt and suspicion - and usually for good reason.

The relationship that develops over the course of the story between E. W. Bloodworth - an elderly man who left the area, his wife and family, many years before - and his grandson Fleming, whom he has never seen is one of the most touching depictions I've come across in some time, without ever venturing anywhere near the maudlin. The Bloodworth clan - and their neighbors and acquaintances - are a pretty rough-hewn lot. They number among their members bootleggers, drunks, hell-raisers, stand-by-your-man women and I-ain't-takin-any-more-of-your-BS women. Fleming is a pretty intelligent - if uneducated - young man, and he is instantly attracted to his grandfather's personality and stories of his life. E. F. is a banjo player and singer, a collector of old tunes - mostly blues. His fame actually spread to the point of a record label recording eight of his songs - but he never chose to pursue music as a career. It simply meant too much to him.

When E. F. decides to return home after many years away, he stirs the stew of a lot of family members and other locals - he's not exactly welcomed back by everyone with open arms. One of his sons, in particular, Brady, is downright hostile. Brady is quite a piece of work himself, living with his elderly mother (E. F.'s wife) and casting spells and hexes on any and all who cross him. He's looked upon by the locals as a bit of a curiosity and a crackpot - but at the same time, with enough trepidation that they try not to wind up on his bad side.

There's a whole cast of memorable characters here - and a main plot with several related subplots that whirl and eddy around each other like currents in a stream. Definitely enough to keep the reader involved and interested. William Gay is a writer of amazing talent and patience - if you're a fan of well-written, compelling fiction that contains emotion as well as a gentle dose of humor now and then, you owe it to yourself to check out his work. My next stop is his short story collection, I HATE TO SEE THAT EVENING SUN GO DOWN.