Ned's Reviews > The Long Home

I’m filled with that rare sense of pure reading joy at being deepened, improved and highly entertained by a great novel. This is a story, a real one, but I had to force myself to slow it down since every single word, every sentence, and the arrangement are something to savor and turn over and over. But first, how I got here: Haphazardly I started communicating with a virtual stranger online about books we had in common. He suggested William Gay, new to me, and I read Twighlight which I loved. Then I found Goodreads and those with similar tastes as mine wrote glowing reviews, almost without exception, of this little known (I think) author. So I added him to my short list of authors who I plan to read from earliest to last. The Long Home is Gay’s first, and I am beyond words.

What I don’t like about this book: Nothing, nada, nil.

What I like:

1. The author is unknown, mysterious, not widely recognized (my joy in being on the “in”).
2. The author seems ordinary, quiet, unglamorous and committed to great writing for its own sake. I don’t want to know too much about him as a person yet, I want to absorb his body of art.
3. The story is set in remote hills, in a time before I was born (I can learn from the days of my father and my father’s father of humble yet noble character).
4. The writing is about nature, the feeling of the earth, the sky, the seasons and the emotions they bring forth about time passing and the permanence of all life and our temporal place on earth.
5. The characters are old, young, and all between and authentically drawn in their thoughts and their language and thoughts. They are original, surprising, not formulaic or taken from preceding styles.
6. The story is dramatic; it has a beginning and end and conflicts aplenty. I could not imagine how it would turn out and I cared deeply about the people. It was not neat, it had resolution for some and chaos for others. The final outcome is left open for some, yet the main character meets his moments of revelation and gives finality to the human theatre and a dramatic closure.
7. The language is unique for its time and place, and how a modern writer can recreate that is magic and all but incomprehensible to the reader. It goes beyond skill and craft, and achieves alchemy like all great art (think Charlie Parker in zen-state, the notes and fingering and phrasing blurred, the mind turned off and channeling something beyond intellect).
8. It touches the core of all being, nature and man and spirit: A boy grows up, meets world, learns the depravity and kindness of humanity, finds and loses passion, plays his hand, deals with consequences. The age old conflict of love against the inhumanity and hardness of others who have chosen a different path (material, power) is played out. On top of it all, the wisdom of the seer, regretting his judgments, but saved just in time, offers the hope of redemption we all seek, deep down.
9. There are protagonists, villains and bit players, all tuned to perfection.

A sampling:

1. (p 66) the young girl caught between a rock and hard place, judging the young man and her keeper: “When she had been a little girl she had tried to think of Hardin as her father. A father was strong and Hardin looked as remorseless and implacable as an Old Testament God, there was no give to him. The man whose blood she’d spring from was flimsy as a paperdoll father you’d cut from a catalog, a father who when the light was behind him looked curiously transparent. No light shone through Hardin and in a moment of insight she thought she had seen a similar core of stubbornness in Winer. Somehow you knew without shoving him that there was no give to him either”.
2. (p 222), the sinister strongman Jiminiz hired by the villain Hardin: “’What I like about you is you never ask me why’, Hardin said. ‘Why is that, Jiminiz?’. ‘I’m afraid you’d tell me,’ Jiminiz said.”
3. (p 225), Roy the bit player in the pool hall observed by the young man: “Winer drank from his Coke and studied the pool game in progress. Roy Pace had found a sucker. Roy was paralyzed from the waist down and went in a wheelchair. His head was oversized and pumpkinshaped and there was a peculiar mongoloid cast to his face but he had won a small fortune off traveling salesmen who put great stock in appearances”.
4. (p 226), Buttcut (don’t ask ), friend of the our protagonist, out on a Saturday night: “I never seen such a crop of hairyankled men in my life. You’d think with a war bein fought a man might stumble up on a little stray pussy just every now and then. But hell no.”

Finally, all the elements are there for a particular genre: Mayhem, bootleg whiskey, intrigue, macabre deformed figures, beautiful innocents, impossible odds, etc etc.
But that is all beside the point...