Country: USA
Genre: Southern Gothic
Pages: 292
Spring that year was a strange a solitary time. There were days where the only car that passed below his house was the mailman, weeks when he spoke or heard no word of human speech. Boyd did not come and he did not come and there was no letter, as if the border of trees he'd walked into had fallen closed behind him like a curtain that shrouded the mysteries of one world from the mysteries of another.
I don't think anybody would begrudge me if I called William Gay a difficult author. This would be inaccurate and a little unfair, though. The New York Times blurb on the cover of PROVINCES OF NIGHT calls Gay "Earthily Idiosyncratic". I don't know about the "earthily" part, but idiosyncratic describes his prose quite well. He's a man who walks to his own drum and therefore he's not accessible for everybody. Southerners go mad for Gay, but for someone who doesn't really understand...well, the idiosyncratic universe that is the southern U.S, the novels of William Gay may be a little hermetic. He's still somewhat of a mystery to me. A mystery who writes a gorgeous prose about the essence of the South, or at least how I perceive it. Family, breathtaking nature, latent violence and a certain propensity for chaos.
As I was saying, PROVINCES OF NIGHT is a family novel. In the previous Gay I reviewed, TWILIGHT was about family also, but the central theme was vengeance. Here, the central theme is the inescapable nature of blood bonds. E.F Bloodworth is coming back in his sons life like a boomerang, thirty years after leaving. While his reasons to leave were good (not great, but not irresponsible), his reasons to stay away were a bit more shaky. His sons don't want him in the portrait and most important, they don't want him anywhere near their mother he abandoned. Doesn't it remind you of a story you've already read? Yeah, I thought so too, PROVINCES OF NIGHT really is an inverted take on the prodigal son's in The Bible. Prodigal dad, that's pretty clever, isn't it? Somehow, it suits what I know of the southern spirit a lot better than the original *.
Where the novels gets intellectually robust, is by the treatment Gay gives to the influence of E.F Bloodworth's behavior on the entire cast of characters. His absence dictated the future of his sons Warren and Boyd, who became two different sides of their dad. His comeback is dictating the behavior of his third kid Brady who's making it a missing to push E.F back to the void where he belongs in the eyes of his family. That was the really cool part of PROVINCES OF NIGHT. But here's the thing about William Gay. He thoroughly refuses to give you anything in a straightforward, conventional way. The best way I can describe William Gay's prose and story structure is a flowing river. Story elements are scattered across, floating and you pick up what you can while staring at the river in a daze and that the experience as a while that makes sense. The river, the movement and the floating story parts. Does that even make sense?
There was something oddly restful about fireflies. He couldn't put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they'd seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed about the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night.
No, William Gay isn't a difficult author. At least not the way Faulkner is. Gay's syntax is peculiar, but his language isn't. He's one of those artists who doesn't seem to care at all about pleasing a target audience and rather just feels like writing what he writes best. It seems like an obvious fact here, but this level of detachment, of idiosyncrasy (that word again) is a rare gift among writers and especially those who published after the turn of the century. Gay's prose is absolutely timeless and compares to the great writers of the South he drew inspiration from. He's underrated for sure. His novels are demanding, because everything is interconnected and flows within his prose and it requires absolute dedication to savor them the way they should. It's also better enjoyed with a chair, a backyard, silence and preferably a strong drink. WG's great, he's just not someone you can read all the time. He's slow-consumption food for your soul.
THREE STARS
* My knowledge of the American South is in fact, as you might have imagined, flawed. So take these comments with a grain of salt, please.