. Spinning .

At this point, the end of Book 2, I am beginning to see a story of seeking, of looking for what man thinks will fill his needs. The old man, E. F. Bloodworth, is looking for a peaceful death.  Brady is looking for his father’s commitment.  Boyd is looking for the wife who left him for a peddlar, and Warren is just looking for good times and women.  We have highly recognizable vehicles: a white truck emblazoned with lettering, Junior Albright’s handpainted yellow car turned taxi.  So we have the movement between states, crossing borders to bring each character out of his comfort zone of home ground.

But what of Fleming? He is forced to drive though he hasn’t a license, when his uncle Warren, then his friend Albright, are too drunk to drive where they need to be. Fleming’s left home alone, yet he walks through the woods when he first needs to get away (as his grandfather, E.F. walks through the woods the final miles of his journey.  The car brings them together, as E.F. requires the use of Albright’s "cab."  And interesting too, the home that E.F. has his sons set up for him before his arrival, is a mobile one–a trailer.

So in this case, the vehicle is the vehicle of story. As we close out Book 2, E. F. has reached his destination but Fleming has discovered love, and she’s forty miles away.

Another that, unless you read this novel, you’ll miss and I don’t want that:

Fleming cranked down the window and the warm day rolled in, the smell of the fields, the distant woods. (pg. 112)

(Note: Faster reading and heavier postings are not related to Judith Martin’s unkind comments on my reviews, but rather because the novel is really good)

There are many similarities between Gay and McCarthy in writing style, but there are some in the building of characters and the characters themselves.

The young Fleming reminds me of Suttree; there is a quiet acceptance, a loneness, a self sufficiency and quiet intelligence about these men.  Fleming, soon after his father, Boyd, takes off to find his wife, goes out into the woods and because of hunger and exhaustion, comes close to Suttree’s own venture into the wilds to find himself. Or to escape, or to return to the comfort zone away from others that only raw nature offers them.

Like Suttree, Fleming appears to be the one stable and dependable force within the story, surrounded by a strange cast of characters that drift around him in all sorts of tension building episodes that interweave and grow tight like vines in attempts to ground them.

Unlike McCarthy, Gay tells us more about his characters and how they think and feel though still allowing us to judge their actions and interactions for ourselves. 

Gay is quite skillful in setting up his story and giving us plenty of sideplots that are self-standing and yet nicely interwoven by the characters.  For example, Brady Bloodworth, Fleming’s uncle and Boyd’s brother, supposedly claims certain powers of foresight and abilities to cast hexes on people.  Brady appears to successfully sicken the mailman who’s run over his dog. Fleming tells his friend Junior Albright about his uncle and Albright, whom Gay has already endowed with a serious problem as a result of a rather hilarious scenario, does ask Brady to help him.  But there is something that Gay has given us as a detail earlier in the book that we delightedly pick up on when the spell is about to be cast.

Love it.

I’ve been reading William Gay’s novel Provinces of Night and as is my
habit lately, I’ve been reading not only for story, themes, imagery,
language, etc., but I found myself following the trails of the
characters as I would in a hypertext piece.  There are three
generations of men: the grandfather, old and ill and wanting to come
home to the wife and three sons he abandoned twenty years ago; his son
Boyd, determined to find the wife who has left him; and Boyd’s son,
Fleming, abandoned by his mother and then his father as he takes off
after her.

There are layers of time here that and place that intersect as those who have left drift in and out of the minds and thus the place of the story. Characters become alive and real and float away. Fleming, a young man whose interest in reading and writing is likely borne of being deserted, has his first sexual experience and even this turns out to be with a woman who leaves him.  Fleming has become independent and makes his own roads.  Here, at the end of Book 1, we find a metaphor of his life:

He sat for a time and rested.  He was uncertain as to which way to go.  If he bore left he would wind up at his grandmother’s.  Straight ahead followed the spine of the ridge to his home.  There was something mystic about crossroads, they doubled the options, confused both pursuer and pursued.  He didn’t know which he was, and after a while he made a pillow of the magazines and slept this night at the crossroads.  (p. 73)

While it may seem contradictory to say that he has self confidence even as the above states his uncertainty, it is the fact that his decision is to spend the night at the crossroads, feeling secure enough to sleep at what is usually considered a metaphor for great changes.

Just had to share this one:

He went on.  When he reached the crossroads the moon was well up and the intersecting roads lay dusted with silver until they faded into the velvet trees.  (p. 73)

Gay gives us texture in shades of grey, sparkling and soft.  It also, without saying it, describes a place one would think of as silent, a magical place.

And I’m going back to this one I can’t get out of my head:

The wind was at the trees like something alive and faint light quaked and died, flared and diminished far to the west and he held his breath waiting for the thunder.  It finally came, so faint it was like a dream of thunder, a hoarse incoherent whisper, just a madman mumbling to himself in the eaves of the world.  (p. 26)

It’s personification of nature, and Gay is not afraid to call the wind "alive" right off the bat.  He builds the image with the pulsing lightning, softens it with the words "dream" and  "hoarse" as if the wind would be a gentle thing and harmless.  Then he gives us  the kicker, "just a madman mumbling to himself in the eaves of the world." 

There is a feeling you get from this novel that is similar to reading poetry.  You find yourself enjoying the language, the flow of words that feel handpicked, thought about carefully before he felt them the perfect way to tell his story.

More about the story later.

I know I’ve been slow with this novel, but reading Gay is often like reading McCarthy, or poetry:

They laid aside their tools when all the sun there was was a fierce chromatic rose flaring behind the thunderhead and by the time they reached the roadbed night was seeping down out of the trees and nighthawks came slant out of the mauve dusk like flung stones. (p. 23)

It’s all beautifully put, and I particularly like "nighthawks came slant out of the mauve dusk…"  It’s a picture, it’s got color and movement.  The use of "slant" is particularly useful here to establish what we all would simply have called the overused "swoop."

But the next sentence is where once again I see a repetition that’s not needed (in my mind) for reinforcement:

When they reached the house full dark had fallen and the house was cold and dark and enigmatic like some house abandoned, like some house where no one lived at all.

The double use of "dark" is too obvious, and the "abandoned" is the same way of saying "where no one lived at all."  I think we’ve already gotten the image from previous reading that the two men who live here have a heavy sense of loss since the wife/mother has, well, abandoned them.  I love imagery in novels, but when I become too aware of it, when it seems to scream out rather than add another facet, it’s like someone trying to make a point by speaking the same thing louder rather than offering it in a clearer way.