Just when it seemed that the superb writers of the US south could no longer surprise, or improve upon one of the world's finest literary traditions, along comes this astonishing, dark, offbeat novel possessing equal measures of weirdness and beauty. A suitably dead wasteland with its share of old bones and ghosts, "a land no one would have", provides an inspired backdrop for a narrative in which one family's collective disasters spin about in the ether, while the only sane and relatively undamaged member of the Bloodworth clan, young Fleming, a relative innocent given to reading novels, attempts to develop and survive in spite of the misfits he lives among.
Somehow William Gay has drawn on many of the almos standard elements of Southern Gothic while at the same time creating an entirely original, textured portrait of an aimless small-town community. He may toy with the clichΘs but he ultimately avoids them. Gay's second novel - which, when they finish it, should send readers out hunting for his debut, The Long Home - is the most exciting work from a new Southern writer since West Virginian Breece d'j Pancake's angry, urgent collection, Trilobites, in 1993.
Gay is different; the vibrancy of living speech as well as controlled rage informs the action here. Even at their most intense, many of the exchanges between the characters are funny, while the more abstract passages are often lyrical and profound. Gay has been compared with Flannery O'Connor and, rather less convincingly, with Cormac McCarthy. His broad vision may be as lofty as McCarthy's but it is also far less theatrical. Above all, Gay has a powerful sense of comedy brilliantly served by shrewdly underplayed dialogue that at times echoes that of William Gaddis. The funeral day sequence would leave Faulkner feeling envious.
Old E.F. Bloodworth, like some fallen wanderer out of a Greek tragedy, has finally decided to come home to the family he deserted years before. No one is very excited. His three sons are about as crazed a trio as would cause any failed daddy to hang his head in shame. Brady, the dog lover, who claims second sight, still lives at home with mother. He has devoted his life to his wild pets and vendettas, sustaining himself by placing hexes on his enemies
Another brother, Boyd, Fleming's father, has taken to stalking his absent wife's lover, while the shadowy Warren, the third son, drinks away his life in between bouts of casual sex and self-realisation. Young Fleming has come to accept his hopeless home, which lacks a mother and offers only a preoccupied father who spends little time there. Early in the novel, the boy meets Spivey, his English teacher, in a local cafΘ. "Have you dropped out of school, Fleming?" asks Spivey, "Well, I don't know," the boy answers, "I guess not. I just haven't been going lately." Later, during one of his several hilarious attempts to seduce the more sexually mature local siren, Raven Lee Halfacre - whose mother, a faded beauty, is either drunk or sleeping these days - the girl asks him what he would be doing if he wasn't with her. "I don't know. Reading, sleeping. Nothing. Listening to my cells break down and die. What would you do?"
Unlike many novelists, Gay uses literary references without becoming arch or self-conscious. It seems perfectly natural that Thomas Wolfe is the writer Fleming most defers to. There's a mad logic at work when Fleming, in a long overdue gesture of rebellion, throws Of Time and the River into his uncle's face. "It burst Brady's nose and opened a cut at the corner of his left eye. It staggered out him back against a sewing machine cabinet . . ."
In contrast with the hectic experiences of the younger characters is the twilight zone inhabited by Julia, the woman whose mind has finally left her, just as her husband did, Old Bloodworth retains a peculiar stateliness. His blues recordings testify tp his former self, but the ancient renegade is still sharp.
When one of the characters, a car mechanic, sports a splotchy fake tan, Bloodworth surveys the mess, remarking, "You put me in mind of a spotted horse I had one time . . . Come out of north Mississippi, I named him Cisco. His pattern of spots was laid out a whole lot similar to yours. Course I doubt he could have rebuilt a automobile engine."
There's not a word wasted in this living, breathing narrative populated by strongly-drawn characters. In many ways, it is Fleming's story of romance and survival, but it is also a fresh original lament for the fading traces of the old South. Gay's vivid prose and dramatic instinct create lasting images and human moments of genius. This is a far bigger book than many novels twice its size, and it deserves its place in a rich tradition
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
