The Long Home

by William Gay

In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to a human evil that is greater and closer at hand than any the boy can imagine - until he learns of it first-hand. Gay's remarkable debut novel, The Long Home, is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil who recognizes even as a child that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it.

Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude, longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach.

• ISBN10: 1878448056
• ISBN13: 9781878448057
• Publish Date: 1 August 2000 (first published 1 November 1999)
• Publish Status: Unknown
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 257
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

In his short story “The Valley,” Rick Bass writes, “I wake up smiling sometimes because I have all my days left to live in this place.” I know exactly what that’s like. William Gay knows exactly what that’s like too.

5 stars in a prayerful kind of way. Hardin and Oliver’s final showdown made my fingers twitch, it’s so good. It didn’t catch and pass Provinces of Night because I love the Bloodworths beyond reason, but The Long Home shares all the essential DNA.

First read January 2012

- - -

July 2012:

I knew these past couple weeks would be dicey, schedule-wise— dicey, schedule-wise being at least two consecutive days I’m not on the farm— and I wasn’t up to conquering new worlds in a book too. I wanted old worlds to carry with me. The oldest world, the most lived-in and loved, a heap of wild quilts to burrow into.

A little more removed from Fleming Bloodworth this time, I loved Winer a little more on his own. Who couldn’t love these fighting, longing creatures? Everyone wants something here, which is exactly how it should be. Not any other way. I’ve got room in my heart for them all.

“You want to see everything at once, Nathan. You want it every bit in front of you where you can look at it, make choices. I never had a choice to make. I just do what there is to do and then I don’t worry over it. It’s done.”

- - -

April 2013:

This is what I read when I’m trying to stall myself from Provinces of Night. When I want Ackerman’s Field, when I want William Gay’s people, but it’s ridiculous how many times I’ve read Provinces already this year. (“It’s not ridiculous,” goes my brain. “It is.” “It’s not.” “It is.”)

But the only consequence of that stalling is that I love this book more and more and more until it might as well be the Bloodworths. Winer is family. Oliver is friend. Hardin is spectre and ghost. They’re not in the shadow of EF and Fleming and Brady and Boyd and Albright; they’re all loved just as much. If it goes on much longer, I’ll be reading Provinces to stall me from The Long Home.