In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to a human evil that is greater and closer at hand than any the boy can imagine - until he learns of it first-hand. Gay's remarkable debut novel, The Long Home, is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil who recognizes even as a child that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude , longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach.
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William Gay lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Oxford American and The Missouri Review. He is at work on another novel and a collection of short stories.
Gay's debut, an ambitious saga of love and retribution set in backwoods Georgia in the 1950s, is by turns quaint and chargedAand sometimes both. The novel begins with the 1932 murder of Nathan Winer, an honest and virtuous laborer, by Dallas Hardin, a corrupt small-town tycoon, after Winer demands that Hardin move his illegal whiskey still off Winer's land. Hardin gradually gains control of his community through extortion, bribery and psychological manipulation. When the dead man's son, also Nathan, unwittingly becomes a carpenter for his father's murderer many years afterwards, he finds his life bound with Hardin's as he falls in love with seductive beauty Amber Rose, frequently used by Hardin as an escort for his rich acquaintances. Ancient sage and recluse William Tell Oliver, who witnessed the elder Nathan's death and has the victim's skull to prove it, steps in to rectify old wrongs when Hardin threatens to kill the young Winer to maintain control over Amber Rose. A haze of mystery hangs over the narrative: voices whisper and strange lights shine from deep within swampy forests, testifying to the presence of a force more powerful than any petty human tyrant. Strange characters inhabit Gay's world, too, like a boy who thinks baby pigs come from underground or a traveling salesman who brags about his largesse but lives off of Winer's mother. Though his dialogue may sometimes be too twangy, Gay writes well-crafted prose that unfolds toward necessary (if occasionally unexpected) conclusions. Enhanced by his feeling for country rhythms and a pervasive, biblical sense of justice, Gay's take on the Southern morality tale is skillfully achieved, if familiar in its scope.
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A moody first novel is offered as its gifted author's claim to the regional-metaphysical mantle currently worn by Cormac McCarthythough, in fact, it reveals the overpowering influence of Faulkner, particularly of the ``Spotted Horses'' chapter in The Hamlet. A terse Prologue recounts the murder in 1932 of tenant farmer Nathan Winer by itinerant thug Dallas Hardin, following an argument over a whiskey still. Then, 11 years later, in the dilapidated backwoods hamlet of Mormon Springs, Tennessee, an increasingly bleak drama is played out among the avaricious Hardin (now a prosperous landowner and small-time entrepreneur); Winer's teenaged son and namesake; a reclusive old man named William Tell Oliver (who harbors his own guilty secrets); and a beautiful girl, Amber Rose, whom Hardin threatens to add to his ill-gotten holdings. The storytold in clipped, often enigmatic parallel scenesemphasizes Oliver's crafty momentum toward redemption, Nathan's thwarted love for Amber Rose and dogged pursuit of vengeance, and the overreaching that brings their tormentor Hardin to a kind of justice. The Long Home (the phrase is an indigenous metaphor for death) contains several memorable scenes and striking characterizations (both Nathan's dysfunctional comrade ``Motormouth'' Hodges and ex-football hero and town drunk ``Buttcut'' Chessor are amusing troublemakers). But the novel drowns in its own rhetoric, with risible abstractions (``she shrieked at the immutability of his back'') and pretentiously grotesque, and inexact, scene-setting (``The bare branches of the apple trees writhed like trees from a province in dementia''). Gay has read Faulkner with reverence (Dallas Hardin is a copy of the master's immortal, insatiable carpetbagger Flem Snopes), and imitated him without a sense of when to stopor much wit. When it emerges from the fog of verbiage, Gay's debut tells a gripping and intermittently haunting story. If he ever decides to write his own novel, it may be a good one. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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