It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.
In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.
I’m going to go with the best way I know to put this. If you took what I love about Cormac McCarthy, and what I love about Justified, and what I love about home, the center of that Venn diagram is this book.
Meaning, there wasn’t a pleasure center in my brain this didn’t light up like Cleveland. Meaning, if there were any folks I’d bring to life out of a book it’s the Bloodworths out of this one.
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January 2013: If this was my favorite book of 2011, and my favorite book of 2012, kicking the year off with it means it can be my favorite book of 2013 too, right? Just kidding. Trick question. There is no question.
I read this nine times this past year. Nine. I don’t know when I’ve had more of a favorite book. It puts its fingers on the keys and nails every chord.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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3 January, 2013:
Finished reading
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3 January, 2013:
Reviewed