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Provinces of Night
William Gay. Anchor: 2002 (paperback). ISBN: 0385499280. 292 pages.
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The ultimate manly-man story for the manly-man in your life! William Gay probably wouldn't thank us for that description. After all, his newest novel is yet another sensitive and sensual literary masterpiece, as craftily and delicately constructed as his national award-winning novel of a couple years back, The Long Home.
In this new novel, he returns to a time and a place that he conquered for his own in that earlier work, the American South of the mid-twentieth century. Gay has been compared many times to Faulkner--just as murky, spooky, gothic, and elemental, just as proficient in presenting both the cultural and regional climates of the South on one big elegant platter. We don't want to pick a bone with one of America's acknowledged Greats, but William Gay has William Faulkner beat in terms of both readability and humor--not only will you understand what's happening on every page, you'll find yourself snickering quietly as much as not.
Gay's novel is extra-manly only in the sense that it is overrun by frankly real, brutally realized male characters, namely, E.F. Bloodworth and clan. The aging patriarch himself, an inveterate banjo picker and con-man, is finally coming home, after thirty years, to his three lost sons, his troubled grandson Fleming, Fleming's delusional best friend Junior Albright, and oh yes, his once and hopefully future wife.
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