Provinces of Night: A Novel

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Overview

It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

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What People Are Saying

Barry Hannah

A staggering talent. Almost a personal revival of handwork in fiction--superb--must be listened to and felt.
— (Barry Hannah, author of Airships and Geronimo Rex)

Elwood Reid

Provinces of Night is an old-fashioned barrel-aged shot of Tennessee storytelling. Gay's tale of ancient wrongs and men with guns is high-proof stuff.
— (Elwood Reid, author of What Salmon Know and Midnight Sun)

Melinda Haynes

Provinces of Night is simply brilliant. William Gay writes with such astonishing clarity and authenticity that every single word inside this book rings true. Poetic and visceral, his words excavate a corner of the South with a new standard of excellence and readers and writers everywhere are the better for it. A must-read for anyone aware of the changing pulse of American literature.
— (Melinda Haynes, author of Mother of Pearl)

Steve Yarbrough

It is time to stop calling William Gay an exciting new voice. In Provinces of Night he proves that he is simply one of our finest voices.
— (Steve Yarbrough, author of The Oxygen Man)

Tom Franklin

Provinces of Night is one magnificent achievement, a wise, spare, hilarious, bighearted tale delivered in language as lovely as the Tennessee hills at dusk. To the list of premier Southern writers that includes Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Lewis Nordan, add the name of William Gay.
— (Tom Franklin, author of Poachers)

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

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From William Faulkner to Flannery O'Connor, the American South has such a rich tradition in gothic literature that it almost seems blasphemous to ask its contemporary writers for new material. Last year, with the publication of The Long Home, Tennessee native William Gay proved that not doing so would be our loss. Hardscrabble and soulful, Gay unleashed prose that reverberated in the mind like an August thunderstorm. In Provinces of Night he proves that his first effort was no fluke by bringing to life one of the most vivid families in recent memory: a raucous, whiskey-drinking clan called the Bloodworths.

The year is 1952 and the place a small backwater town in Tennessee, where Gay's cast prepares for the return of family patriarch E. F. Bloodworth. The old man's reappearance inspires fear, envy, and pure hysteria among his numerous offspring. And with good reason: At one time, E. F. would kill if he had to (he shot a deputy who was using E. F.'s wife as a shield), and the man can make a banjo talk. Not surprisingly, E. F.'s three sons have inherited his ornery nature in spades. Warren has become a drunk and a womanizer. Brady, albeit the most responsible, liberally applies hexes on his enemies. And finally, there's Boyd, a divorcé hell-bent on tracking down his ex-wife and her new lover. Boyd's son, Fleming, might be the only Bloodworth capable of forging his own path. From the shady perch of his father's porch, the young man has been quietly applying himself to the trade of writing. Over the course of the novel, Fleming steps out from the protective shade of his stomping ground and is rewarded with plenty of material for his stories. The young man drinks, fights, and frequently bails his uncles out of hot water. The family's biggest problem, it turns out, is not E. F's homecoming but that part of him that never left, the part that lives in each of them.

Some of these episodes -- such as Fleming's attempt to recapture a hog -- are pure slapstick, which Gay affects brilliantly. More subtle and memorable, however, are Fleming's fledgling attempts at acquainting himself with the fairer sex and Gay's depiction of his desire to transcend his family's legacy. Gay masterfully guides the reader through Fleming's awakening, lingering and interpolating where need be, biting his lip when events speak for themselves. In the end, he lends credence to the claim that, even if their last name ain't Faulkner, southerners spin the best yarns.

Bob Minzesheimer

Provinces of Night is not a novel for readers driven mainly by plot, or troubled by Gay's indifference for conventions like commas and quotation marks (à la McCarthy). But there is much to admire here: breathtaking, evocative writing and a dark, sardonic humor.
— USA Today

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From The Critics

Like one of Wallace Stevens's best-known poems, Gay's (The Long Home) second novel begins with a jar on a hill in Tennessee--only this one appears to contain tiny human bones. That's a suitably ominous prelude to the dark saga of the Bloodworth clan, which revolves mostly around 17-year-old Fleming, an aspiring writer trying to evade the family legacy of violence and self-destruction. It is 1952 and his father, Boyd, has left their decrepit mountain home "seventy miles back of Nashville" for Detroit, not to work in an automobile factory like the other "hillbillies" but to search for--and kill--the peddler who has run off with his wife. Meanwhile, Fleming's grandfather, E.F. Bloodworth, a blues musician, is on his way home after having suffered a "stroke of paralysis" 20 years earlier. His handsome Uncle Warren, a former war hero now at loose ends, is a dissipated womanizer with an even more dissolute and unstable son, and his Uncle Brady "witches" for water, tells fortunes and casts hexes on those who do him wrong. Even as the Tennessee Valley Authority is moving in to clear and flood their valley and bring in "the electricity," Fleming's relatives and neighbors live by the backwoods code of violence exemplified by E.F., a man whose exploits are legendary among the locals. Only Raven Lee Halfacre, the 16-year-old daughter of a promiscuous alcoholic and the "prettiest girl in a three county area," offers the boy a glimpse of another way of life. Fleming's name echoes that of one of Faulkner's most memorable characters, and Gay's prose resembles that of Faulkner at his most florid. His stylistic quirks--especially his refusal to set off dialogue with quotation marks--take some getting used to, but the pitch-perfect rendition of the cadences of Southern speech and deeply poetic descriptions of the landscape more than compensate. (Dec. 26) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307489869
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 9/9/2009
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Sales rank: 157,537
File size: 2 MB
Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Meet the Author

William Gay’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. He has won the William Peden Award and the James Michener Memorial Prize. He lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Read an Excerpt

It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.

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