Blood Harrikin
William Gay’s harrowing new novel goes Cormac McCarthy one better
It is more than a mild understatement to call William Gay a late bloomer: he was already 57 when he published his first book, The Long Home, in 1999. He is also a gleaming specimen of that peculiar species, the eccentric autodidact: he never went to college, never held what most of us would consider a regular job, never seemed the type who would amount to much. And yet all the while he was reading, inhaling entire genres in his trailer home down in Howenwald. He wrote and submitted stories, and was rejected, and wrote some more, until someone finally took notice. He has been the cause célèbre of Southern literature ever since.
The problem is that, being self-taught, Gay produces work that is often overly redolent of his influences and deeply striated by his own idiosyncrasies, not all of which translate as strengths. Gay has been lazily compared with Faulkner, but the more accurate comparison—one to which Gay himself adheres—is with Cormac McCarthy. In Faulkner, violence is one part of the human struggle; in McCarthy and Gay, it is everything. There is no other subject worth writing about. We kill, and we are killed, and we often don’t know why. But what is insight in McCarthy can sometimes feel like gratuity in Gay—a color-by-bloody-numbers approach. The splatterfests that punctuate The Long Home and his second novel, Provinces of Night, are sickening rather than sublime.
Gay is an immensely skilled writer, but like everyone short of Tolstoy he has his weak points. Most writers have put themselves through workshops and MFA programs to get out the wrinkles; Gay has not. He is therefore a more refreshing writer, but after encountering the same flaws in book after book, it’s hard not to wish a teacher had sat him down along the way and told him how to make his dialogue less wooden, his characters’ motivation more clear. Sometimes a little literary ironing is a good thing. Without it, Gay’s writing soars on one page only to sink on the next. In his latest novel, Twilight, for example, he can dish out such clunkers as “Breece lived on tenterhooks, waiting for the other shoe to fall” just a few pages after a jaw-droppingly beautiful sentences like “[L]ightning walked the ridges all that July and August and conjured out of the night in strobic configuration stormbent trees writhing in the windy rain.”
And yet Twilight, even as it sustains many of Gay’s weaknesses, represents a big step forward in his authorial skills. It tells the story of Kenneth Tyler, a teenager in rural Middle Tennessee in vaguely post-World War II years. (Almost all Gay’s stories and novels are set in the vicinity of the fictional town of Ackerman’s Field.) Kenneth and his sister Corrie discover that the local mortician has been abusing corpses, including their late father’s. When they confront him with photographs, he hires a local ne’er-do-well, Granville Sutter, to get them back. What ensues is a gripping hunt through the backwoods, with Sutter wreaking all manner of unspeakable violence in his increasingly personal mission to catch—and kill—the pair.
Before Twilight, Gay’s strongest work was his short stories, most of which can be found in the collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down. Both his previous novels lack stamina—they start strong, but descend into cliché and gratuity once he is forced to move the plot toward conclusion. But Twilight is different. Though it takes a few dozen pages to get going, from there on it builds steadily to its climax. Not only is the pacing solid, but the development of the characters is masterful—Sutter grows increasingly sinister; Kenneth matures from an indecisive youth to a dauntless young man.
Much of the action takes place in the Harrikin, a thick expanse of woods in which Kenneth tries to lose Sutter, and out of which he must eventually find his way. The Harrikin was once replete with mining towns and mining money, but when the ore was all extracted, “the people left like the Maya abandoning their cities to build other cities…, [and] the Harrikin grew wild. Trees sprouted up through the works of man. Kudzu and wild grapevines climbed the machinery until ultimately these machines seemed some curious hybrid of earth and steel.” When a massive tornado—thought to be a hurricane, or “harrikin,” by locals—ripped through a few years later, it upturned houses and trees and dirt roads, leaving behind a tangled maze.
The Harrikin, Gay adds, would much later—after the events in Twilight have unfolded—be tamed once again, this time by timber companies. In this way Gay has created a sort of anti-Brigadoon, a quasi-mystical place of darkness and change that exists for a (relatively) brief span of time. Sutter is a part of the Harrikin made human. He brings violent change to a quiet community set in its ways. To defeat him, Kenneth must enter the Harrikin itself, even though he will destroy his old self in so doing.
Violence, in other words, is a force of nature, whether it is embodied in a tornado or a hired killer’s gun. It is simply another way in which change is effected. It cannot be rendered right or wrong, because it exists prior to man-made morality. In order to overcome it, we must accept it, but also master it. With such insight wrapped inside a gripping, well-told story, Gay has finally shown that he is not simply a knockoff McCarthy, but an emerging master in his own right.
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