Provinces of Night - William Gay

What's blood worth?

Much fiction from the American South is preoccupied with the past and with fragmented family life. This literary phenomenon has received its most artful and definitive expession in the novels of William Faulkner and, more recently, Cormac McCarthy. Provinces of Night, William Gay's second novel, slots nicely into this tradition. Indeed, Gay acknowledges his literary precursors by using a line from McCarthy's novel, Child of God, as an epigraph for his novel.

Set in backwoods Tennessee in the 1950s, Provinces of Night focuses on the Bloodworth family: EF Bloodworth and his estranged wife, Julia; their three sons, Warren, Brady, and Boyd; and Boyd's son, Fleming. EF, after an absence of twenty years, returns to the town of Ackerman's Field, and to the wreckage of his family. However, return and reconciliation aren't the same things, as EF finds out. He has—either by his absence or his fierce, disruptive presence—scarred each of his sons: Warren is a philandering drunkard; Boyd a cuckold bent on revenge; and Brady a bitter, unbalanced man who casts hexes on his enemies.

EF's old sins and omissions still reverberate in the present, most notably in the form of Brady. More than any of Gay's characters, Brady embodies the night he tries to dispel. "You're goin straight to hell", he tells EF. "When I look at you settin there now it's like you're already on your way. Coming into the city limits of hell. Your hair's startin to singe and little blue flames are flickerin all over you. Smoke boilin out of your ears. Your blood'll boil and your brain snap and pop like grease in a hot pan. Your bones'll burn white-hot and just burn through your flesh."

Fittingly, given this rancour between father and son, and given the thunderous significance of the name "Bloodworth", the notion of blood obligation is central to Provinces of Night. Right from the prologue, which describes the discovery of foetuses interred in glass mason jars, to a series of decisions that confront EF's grandson, Fleming, it is precisely the worth of one's blood that Provinces of Night ponders. To teenaged Fleming, the novel's protagonist, falls the task of recognising the debts properly owed to one's blood. The choices he makes will either repeat or, at least in part, redeem the mistakes of the other Bloodworth men.

Gay juxtaposes the fractured Bloodworth family with Fleming's love for Raven Lee Halfacre, "about the prettiest girl in a three-county area". Redemption through romance is an old story, yet Gay tiptoes around cliché, and handles Fleming's immediate and enraptured fall with beguiling delicacy.

In Fleming's love for Raven Lee, Gay articulates his vision. The two lovers watch fireflies cluster over the Tennessee River: "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." Only communion illuminates and dispels the night.

All this unfolds against a flawlessly evoked backdrop. A native of Tennessee, Gay depicts Ackerman's Field, its people, and their language with an easy authority. This authority is equally evident in his descriptions of the natural world: "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" and "The trees were brittlelooking and cold and they looked like surreal and patternless ironwork some crazed sculptor had wrought against the heavens."

Gay's first novel, The Long Home, has weaknesses common to many first novels: writing that tries too hard to impress, and wears its influences a little too obviously. Provinces of Night, however, shows a greater command of material and execution. The prose is economical and acute, and doesn't strain for a descriptive frisson on every page.

This novel shows William Gay to be more than an imitator of McCarthy and Faulkner. He may chart similar fictional topographies, but he makes them his own. Provinces of Night transfigures the conventional and hackneyed into the bewitching and wise.

-- Simon Williamson