Provinces of Night

William Gay · ★★★★★

William Gay's Provinces of Night is built on a proposition about being human: how we string lives along a continuum of images and reactions to them. This novel makes that case sentence by sentence. I haven't been this blown away by a novel since I first started discovering them. That's about three decades ago for anyone counting. I'll admit, I am susceptible to the beauty of the English language used to its highest level. Living in Spain has certainly restricted my exposure to this, but I would argue that, no matter the reader's context, Gay is a master craftsman who has been starved of the readers he deserves. I've been obsessively posting quotes from this novel on my Bluesky feed all month. Listen to this one: Light through an intricate wickerwork of branches moved and swayed, moved and swayed. Light and shadow latticed together moved endlessly on the earth and she stared at it, thinking for a time that she could divine pattern there, order. But the pattern was as random and unordered as life. If you are the type of reader who holds a highlighter to their books, by the last page you'll be carrying a book soaked in neon. The novel is stopreading gorgeous. His visual ideas are persistent and poetic and they firmly establish Gay's perspective as a writer. He sits close to his characters and observes them, notes what they see and stays disciplined about restricting his narration to their actions and their speech. The few times he does let the reader in on a character's interior, the effect conducts a shocking intimacy. Check out this scene between Fleming, our inexperienced protagonist, and a girl who picks him up one night while he's living by himself in the woods: In the oblong area of light she posed for a moment like a parodic ballerina then pulled the dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. She slid her panties down holding them momentarily with a toe to step out of them then turned breasts bobbing to close the door. She vanished. He heard the thumbbolt click. It seemed to take her an eternity to cross from the doorway to the bed, in its span folks were born and lived their lives and died, whole generations passed away. When she slid against him he had decided to remain calm and save all these moments for bleaker times, each instant a snapshot, a flower pressed in the pages of a Bible. But when she grasped his hand and placed it on her sex his mind reeled away and images shuttled like unsequenced frames in a film. He was unaccustomed to such urgency, and he thought that perhaps this was the way things were done in Detroit. She was pulling him onto her, saying, here baby, I'll do this, and he felt himself sliding into her and she was whispering against his ear, No, baby, take it easy, slow down, we've got all night to do this. In addition to being hilarious ("he thought that perhaps this was the way things were done in Detroit"), there's a throughline of light to dark, exterior to interior, distance to closeness in this small passage that is so concise without ever feeling labored, and this is my catnip. This is also Gay's greater project as an artist. Provinces of Night takes its title from a line in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, and the two writers share a dedication to a particular type of writing craft: both build meaning out of units of light and their description. McCarthy will spend the opening of a scene on someone lighting candles in the dark before the image widens. Gay works the same vein, but without the Epic Authoritative Biblical voice, without the weight of fate. He is humbler than McCarthy, and warmer. He loves his characters, even the ones he knows are simply violent, and he watches them think, and while they think, they notice the natural world of light around them. What the book arrives at, by watching them long enough, is this: we string lives along a continuum of images and reactions to images. I'm not sure how many of you have heard of or read William Gay. Hopefully all of you and I'm just catching up. Writers, of course, have their own legacies to tend to. Wolfe's Of Time and the River, for example, threads through Provinces of Night: early on, Fleming (the kid from the sex scene above, aspiring writer, seventeen, reading his way out of Tennessee) finds a paper bag on his doorsill, a gift from the uncle who loves him, Thomas Wolfe among the three books inside, two twenties and a ten taped to page one. Much later, the other uncle (a hex-caster who sells $50 curses from his mama's porch) turns up carrying the same book and asks whether it's Fleming's. Fleming takes it out of his hands and swings it into his face, bursts his nose, opens a cut by his eye. A thousand pages of American literature, with the price of a curse stuck to page one, wielded against the man who trades in curses. A boy trying to become a writer, claiming that inheritance by swinging it at the family that would stop him. A scene too perfect to criticize for its belabored metaphor. Look Homeward, Angel is the Wolfe most readers know. It's lyrical, attentive to the music of American English, a coming-of-age, and Gay's novel belongs to that tradition even when it's putting the other Wolfe to use as a club. Faulkner's shadow is on the book too, as it is on anyone writing Southern literature: the poor characters, the gallery of personalities, the gothic setting. But Gay is warmer than Faulkner and less interested in the nasty or the experimental. The tradition he belongs to is the one Wolfe opened. If I am at all responsible for turning you on to this writer, I will have done my small part spreading a fine work of American literature further than its natural popularity has taken it.