. Spinning .

Whew.  Should’ve been framing but I think I would have locked the shop doors once I got into the last 25 pages.

Somehow, the ending came full force and fast.  Almost a little too fast, as if the whole summer’s problems came to a head and got settled on a few days in November.  But the story is credible; though I originally questioned some of the events, after thinking about it, I can see where they were building up and things forgotten (a book that plays a role I completely missed), and E.F.’s belief in his imminent death as well as his nature did answer my questions.

One thing that may not have been missed by William Gay, but it stuck in my own head as an important detail that never panned out was this:

You have to wear this hardhat all the time you’re on the work site.
Have you not got another white one like you got?  Albright was licking the point of his pencil, studying Woodall’s hat.
These blue hardhats are laborer’s hats.  This one I got is a superintendent’s hat.  It might be a little early in the day for one of them.  I been here twenty years and I own the company. (p. 49)

That’s Albright signing on for a job with Woodall that turn’s disastrous and just the beginning of his troubles.  Then this, when he pays Brady to put a hex on Woodall to get him off his back:

I’ll need somethin of his.  Somethin he touched.
Albright rose and went through the front room. (…)Outside the yard was dappled with shadow and light, the moon was out now and curdled clouds ran before it as if in the keep of some enormous lunar wind.
He took the blue hardhat out of the back floorboard and for a moment just stood holding it, wondering how Brady could use it, trying to feel something of Woodall in its sleek metal surface. He put the hat on his head and stood remembering the hot metal through his shoes, the clicketyclack of the crimper.  He tried to think as Woodall might think.  Then in a moment of insight he saw himself as a fraction of the fool he was. (p. 101)

Gay makes a big deal of the white (Woodall’s) versus the blue (Albright’s) hat, and I suspected immediately that that’s where the curse could go terribly wrong.  Well it didn’t work that way and I wondered if Gay himself had forgotten about it.  Well, he didn’t; it was just much more subtle than I expected.

Gay’s writing is exquisite. Language lovers will enjoy the book for this alone. And I find I’m not alone in comparing him to Cormac McCarthy.  But McCarthy lovers (and I am one) won’t be put off by the similarity.  I think instead, they’ll be as happy as I was to discover another great writer.

There were several threads in this narrative and little by little they are each knotted off.  Here’s just a sample of where Albright’s debt to Woodall is being paid off, his guilt assuaged by his painting Woodall’s widow’s house:

She refilled their glasses and seated herself across from him in a bentwood rocker.  Albright was noticing that she had done something to her hair.  He did not know what, but it looked somehow softer, less like a lacquered wig.  Perhaps it was the cognac but she was looking considerably less froglike and more like a kind, well-educated woman. (p.260)

Well where this leads is a riot; and what it reveals of a situation that has been interwoven within the main tale is just hysterical and had me laugh out loud.

Though a subplot has been somewhat settled to and brought to its end, there is still one small niggling thing that can’t quit my hold on this.  A small detail that will either be brought to a conclusion or something that I feel Gay might have missed. 

With fifty pages to go (and believe me, I wish there were more!) I can’t help but consider the back cover blurb and feel a bit confused:

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.

For some reason, Raven Lee didn’t appeal to me; a rather sarcastic, self-centered girl from the first date with Fleming, though I warmed up to her a bit when I got to know her better, recalling such girls from my high school years–likely with some envy.  But Fleming sort of cools off on her too it seems; the red-hot flush of wanting to be with her is sort of toned down real early in the game.  At this point, he’s seen her maybe 3 or 4 times and after a close encounter of the wild kind at a drive-in, I’m not sure they’ve had sex yet.

There was also a statement made about things changing and it didn’t really seem to have the basis–though I can’t say much because now I can’t find it.

Certain things are coming together and the tension is building, and there are things that have settled into my mind that I’m still anticipating.  But one thing I might say is that while I read nothing of reviews on book or author prior to a reading, this one back cover blurb has stayed in my head and as I near the last portion of the story I can’t help but get a bit anxious. Have I missed something? Is it up ahead?

There have been some beautiful phrases here, the dialect and tone so well suited to each particular character:

I’ve drunk good whiskey and I’ve drunk bad, the old man told Fleming.  I’ve drunk whiskey so good you could smell the leaves in the woods where it was made and I’ve drunk it so bad you could strip the paint off a barn door with it.  (E.F. Bloodworth/pg. 174)

I’m lookin for a feller named Rutgers, he told her.
He ain’t down the front of my dress, she said.  She slapped his tea onto the red Formica table and walked away.  (Coble/pg. 199)

True, the southern drawl is present in all the characters of this novel set in Tennessee, but the diction is well put forth so that each character does have a way of putting things that distinguishes him from the others. 

In Jamestown, one of the best (and vital to the novel to be well done) elements was the way Matthew Sharpe told the story from multiple characters’ points of view, often depending upon this factor to stress the perception differences of a single incident.

I feel that William Gay shows extreme skill in bringing out character through their conversation.

I like this:

In these early days with the old man it seemed to Fleming that he was already changing, though he had never known his grandfather before and could not have said what he was changing from: from the protagonist of other men’s stories, perhaps, for he no longer looked like a man given to gunfights with deputies, this benign old man watching whatever moved with his wry ironic eyes did not seem the type to clean out Saturday night honkytonks, to be waylaid on Indian Creek by men who rose out of the sage like sepia men of another century who sighted down the barrels of their rifles and blew him off the wagonseat into the bloody weeds.  (p. 173)

Fleming is getting to know his grandfather and holds him up against not just what he reads (he’s an avid reader and wannabe writer) but against the few stories he’s been able to catch from townfolk–since his family has little to say about him. 

Gay’s simile is one laced with ‘authorspeak’ –"protagonist," and referring to the drama and action required of genre novels.  It is an interesting inclusion that reminds us of Fleming’s desire to be a writer in a very subtle manner, and yet one that holds high appeal to the writer/reader.

Here’s supposedly the meaning:

There was something oddly restful about the 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 above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night. (p. 161)

And here’s where I feel I’ve missed something from the book; if the title was taken from this line it would seem to be of utmost import. 

What the above, in the context of the story as it has unfolded, and here, in Fleming’s thoughts after meeting and falling in love with Raven Lee Halfacre, might suggest is his seeing the world in a new way. Maybe he can put some sense of order in his own family by seeing the whole of mankind as a temporary superior force: "transient and fragile…"  Maybe he recognizes human nature as the single drive behind actions.  Maybe he realizes that all this is just a state of mind.

"negative image" is a phrase that may denote a helplessness against what will be, that of life being brief and passing and leaving no mark behind it on the stability of the earth.

How does this concept tie in with my thoughts of movement?