Books We Can’t Quit: The Long Home, by William Gay

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

William Gay’s novel The Long Home is epic in scope. Its rural, desolated landscape offers up the sublime as often as it portends doom. Its villain, Dallis Hardin, bends an entire rural community to his evil designs, gaining power from their weaknesses for liquor and prostitutes. Most of the book focuses on its hero, young Nathan Winer, as he pursues an unlikely love and strives to preserve his dignity while working for the devilish Hardin. The book’s sage, though complicated, elder, William Tell Oliver, opens and closes the story with his struggles to reconcile what he knows about the disappearance of Nathan’s father and his fear of what will happen when he comes forward with the truth. Oliver holds onto his corrosive secret until he must share it in order to prevent young Nathan from an inevitable act of honor-redeeming vengeance that would either land him in jail or in the grave.

Gay’s characters range from solid and kind to phantasmagorically evil. But even his best characters are flawed by pride and poorly-timed righteous indignation, and his worst characters offer glimmers of humanity. So The Long Home pits good against evil, but the rivalry is not entirely fabular but true and possible, too. All this against a backdrop of a 1930s – 40s rural Tennessee, where not everyone has electricity or telephone service, and a lot of people run homemade liquor and bury stashes of cash in the ground. They are dirt-poor dirt farmers, bootleggers, day laborers. They live (and die) by the work of their hands: honestly, dishonestly, generously, greedily – in a web of their own histories full of double-crossings and death.

How have I come this far without even mentioning Gay’s precise and musical ear for language, his portrayals of nature as awesome and awful all in one, his habitual coinage of clever compound words? William Gay was a master.

He hailed from Hohenwald, Tennessee, a community as rural and remote as the ones he renders in his fiction, and not far from the hometown of Cormac McCarthy, who both inspired and mentored Gay. Though I appreciate the beauty of McCarthy’s writing, I have trouble stomaching his unflinching depictions of grisly violence. Led by Gay’s reverence for the man, though, and following the recommendation of a fellow Gay fan, I recently read McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper.

An early work of McCarthy’s, certainly Gay had read it, too, and its influence on The Long Home is clear. Words Gay uses frequently appear in McCarthy’s pages – skirl, abstracted, the exclamation “They Lord God,” a tendency toward neologistic word compounding. Even the spooky wasteland of the “Harrakin” shows up. On top of all that, The Orchard Keeper features a significant aspect of The Long Home’s plot – the discovery of a corpse of one of the character’s murdered fathers in a body of water. In The Long Home, William Tell Oliver discovers Nathan Winer’s father’s skull in a creek behind his property.

McCarthy is arguably a better known and more celebrated writer, but in every scene of Gay’s, more so for me than with McCarthy’s prose, I can feel the dirt under my fingernails and the moist breeze from a cold rain in my face. I can feel evil Dallis Hardin’s hot breath bearing down on my own neck. I experience Gay’s world in a completely immersive and intimate way. His prose knocks me off my feet, no matter what he’s doing with it.

Maybe he’s describing nature: “past the pale dust of the road where a pastel field stretched to a darker border of woods he saw the horizon dissolve in a slanting wash of rain and the jerk of weeds advancing toward him portentous with motion,” and, “It was a lake of india ink, the dark water tending away to nothingness where lay no shoreline, no horizon, just the blueblack mist above it where his mind constructed miragelike images that were not there.”

Or maybe he’s drawing a character, such as when Motormouth Hodges sums up his lot in life: “Whatever luck I ever had just dried up and blowed away”; or when, with one sentence, Gay depicts the awkward burden of Oliver’s knowledge of the elder Winer’s fate: “He felt besieged by knowledge he had not sought and did not want.”

Or maybe he’s setting the stage so we know which character to mistrust, as when he colors Hardin’s character by way of a cautionary tale used in the community to scold children: “If you don’t mind, [Hardin]’ll slip in that winder and carry you off so quiet we won’t even hear him,” because the parents believe Hardin’s “spirit moved in the night, rustled the branches outside their windows, his familiars crouched in the brush where the porchlight faded away.”

No matter what Gay describes, his words grab onto me by my insides, and they don’t let go. I re-read the book another time for this review and still found myself breathless all the way through.

Just shy of 60 when this novel debuted, Gay didn’t survive long past his near-instant literary fame, though while he lasted he published two books of short stories and three novels – all well worth reading. He died at the age of 70 in February of 2012.

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Jody Hobbs Hesler lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Steel Toe Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Prime Number, Pearl, Charlottesville Family Magazine, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, and more. You can follow her at jodyhobbshesler.com or on her Facebook writer page: Jody Hobbs Hesler – Writer.