Rating: 
Summary: A True Voice of the South
Review: Finding THE LONG HOME powerful and fun to read, I was excited to get my hands on this, Mr. Gay's new novel. PROVINCES OF NIGHT exceeded my expectations. Fleming Bloodworth and his grandfather E. F. make an extrodinary pair, the former finding pain and love and bursting with a desire for life (yet with enough wisdom to learn from the latter), and the old man who's come home to find...something, even he's not sure what. A host of eccentric characters round out this work, from a bitter son who casts spells on his enemies, to the funniest adolescent since Cormac McCarthy's Harrogate in SUTTREE. Having grown up with stories of the south, I found Gay's details rich and true. He seems to be writing for himself, drawing on personal stories, humorous experiences and pain and reminds me of other great writers, Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway to name two. I look for an honest voice in fiction and I have certainly found one in William Gay. He is one of the unsung heroes of southern fiction - hell, of fiction period, and he's only written two novels. Here's to many more tales told by this astonishing author.
Rating:
Summary: Beauty
Review: Gay, evoking Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, writes about "simple" people with incredible profundity that employs "drop-dead sentences." Expect to be surprised and overwhelmed by this "carpenter's" mastery of prose. He evokes Faulkner's Cash and God's Jesus--need I say more?
Rating: 
Summary: Evocative Storyteller
Review: Having discovered William Gay's "The Long Home," and read his short stories, I enjoyed "The Provinces of Night" for its vivid portraiture of blood ties of real earthy people of a Tennessee backcountry trapped in a time and a place in the 1950s. Gay is a great scene-setter, threading his story with honest dialogue and episodes that move the story of crumbling loyalties and the age-old strife of the South to conclusion. His weaving of dialogue into the text without quotation marks is slightly burdensome but it worked for Charles Frazier in "Cold Mountain" and for Gay's obvious literary idol, Cormac McCarthy. Quite obviously Gay is a student of Faulkner and McCarthy and is not afraid of literary devices and metaphors too much missing in today's action-sped novels. He is truly a Southern storyteller with the ability to evoke the real world of Tennesseans by blending the past with the present. I like his sense of the natural world, describing with a rich palette.---Jesse Earle Bowden, author of "Look and Tremble: A Novel of West Florida."
Rating: 
Summary: WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT
Review: Having discovered William Gay's "The Long Home," and read his short stories, I enjoyed "The Provinces of Night" for its vivid portraiture of blood ties of real earthy people of a Tennessee backcountry trapped in a time and a place in the 1950s. Gay is a great scene-setter, threading his story with honest dialogue and episodes that move the story of crumbling loyalties and the age-old strife of the South to conclusion. His weaving of dialogue into the text without quotation marks is slightly burdensome but it worked for Charles Frazier in "Cold Mountain" and for Gay's obvious literary idol, Cormac McCarthy. Quite obviously Gay is a student of Faulkner and McCarthy and is not afraid of literary devices and metaphors too much missing in today's action-sped novels. He is truly a Southern storyteller with the ability to evoke the real world of Tennesseans by blending the past with the present. I like his sense of the natural world, describing with a rich palette.---Jesse Earle Bowden, author of "Look and Tremble: A Novel of West Florida."
Rating:
Summary: Not quite "The Long Home"
Review: I ordered this book before it was published solely because of Gay's first novel, "The Long Home." There is no Dallas Hardin in this book: E.F. Bloodworth is mysterious and magnetic, but he is not the embodiment of evil, unfortunately. There's also no Nathan Winer: Fleming Bloodworth is likable, but his drifting was not as interesting as Winer's unconscious search for the truth. I love William Gay's style and I enjoyed every page, but if you're looking for the haunting, darkness and rain feel of "The Long Home," you might be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Good to Read, Good to Know
Review: I read Gay's first novel, The Long Home, and thought that, as well as being a good story, its language captured the East Tennessee rural folk as well as any I'd ever seen in print. No, William Gay's not William Faulkner, and I'm not Bennett Cerf, but Provinces of Night is a good Southern novel. Seventeen year old Fleming Bloodworth is probably a little too good to be totally believed, but there is something in his character that rings true, something that reminds me of my own dad. There are many men who have walked out from behind mules in East Tennesse and managed to make their ways in a world they were not born in nor raised to. There are many others who were never able to make that transition. You don't get to choose your own roots, but they don't have to strangle you either.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Books I Have Read!!
Review: Nearly perfect. Great story, beautiful prose, humor, sadness, thought provoking, page turning. All of that, and one sentence on page 155 I could make absolutely no sense out of.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Books I Have Read!!
Review: Nearly perfect. Great story, beautiful prose, humor, sadness, thought provoking, page turning. All of that, and one sentence on page 155 I could make absolutely no sense out of.
Rating:
Summary: Superb dialogue
Review: One of the best novels I've read in the past few years, "Provinces of Night" shows the influence of Flannery O'Connor and of Cormac McCarthy, but is also highly original. The language and dialogue are what make it most enjoyable. The story is both funny and dark.
Rating:
Summary: AMAZINGLY GOOD WRITING...
Review: When I read William Gay's first novel, THE LONG HOME, recently, I had the strong feeling that I had discovered the work of someone very special - and reading PROVINCES OF NIGHT has confirmed that for me. Gay writes with a carefully and languidly - the breadth and depth of his writing demands full attention from the reader, and the rewards are great indeed. The above-mentioned languid quality of his work does not for a single moment indicate any sort of laziness on his part - writing this good can, of course, come from the foundation of a natural talent, but it takes hard and diligent work to come up with a finished product of this quality. Gay's characters are vivid and real, and they are built up slowly - the reader is required to get to know them, rather than having them dumped off the page and into their lap. His descriptive abilities are astonishing as well - if there isn't a word that suits the image he's trying to get across, he's not above combining existing words into a single unit, and he does so with taste, style and intelligence. There are no cheap, easy gimmicks at work here - just talent and imagination. Set in the same small rural Tennessee town in which his earlier novel takes place - but in the 1950s this time, as opposed to the 1940s - Gay captures the setting and characters with absolute perfection. His country folk are depicted honestly - they are uneducated, to be sure, and some of them are certainly not the brightest match in the box, but he treats them with respect. They come across as honest and real - the figures of speech they employ might seem odd to city dwellers, and their knowledge of the world outside of their area ranges from non-existent to a shadowy grey awareness that is tempered liberally with misinformation and rumor. They look upon outsiders with doubt and suspicion - and usually for good reason. The relationship that develops over the course of the story between E. W. Bloodworth - an elderly man who left the area, his wife and family, many years before - and his grandson Fleming, whom he has never seen is one of the most touching depictions I've come across in some time, without ever venturing anywhere near the maudlin. The Bloodworth clan - and their neighbors and acquaintances - are a pretty rough-hewn lot. They number among their members bootleggers, drunks, hell-raisers, stand-by-your-man women and I-ain't-takin-any-more-of-your-BS women. Fleming is a pretty intelligent - if uneducated - young man, and he is instantly attracted to his grandfather's personality and stories of his life. E. F. is a banjo player and singer, a collector of old tunes - mostly blues. His fame actually spread to the point of a record label recording eight of his songs - but he never chose to pursue music as a career. It simply meant too much to him. When E. F. decides to return home after many years away, he stirs the stew of a lot of family members and other locals - he's not exactly welcomed back by everyone with open arms. One of his sons, in particular, Brady, is downright hostile. Brady is quite a piece of work himself, living with his elderly mother (E. F.'s wife) and casting spells and hexes on any and all who cross him. He's looked upon by the locals as a bit of a curiosity and a crackpot - but at the same time, with enough trepidation that they try not to wind up on his bad side. There's a whole cast of memorable characters here - and a main plot with several related subplots that whirl and eddy around each other like currents in a stream. Definitely enough to keep the reader involved and interested. William Gay is a writer of amazing talent and patience - if you're a fan of well-written, compelling fiction that contains emotion as well as a gentle dose of humor now and then, you owe it to yourself to check out his work. My next stop is his short story collection, I HATE TO SEE THAT EVENING SUN GO DOWN.
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