A World Almost Rotten: The Fictn Of William Gay - The

Contents:

• BT OF WILLIAM GAY
• WILLIAM GAY BOOKS IN ORR
• WILLIAM GAY
• ORR OF WILLIAM GAY BOOKS

BT OF WILLIAM GAY

The great Southern novelist and story wrer William Gay died at his home Hohenwald, Tennsee, on Febary 23rd of this year, at the age of 70. An tensely private man who valued his recln and had no tert the sometim shamels self-promotn required by thors, Gay spoke at great length and on numero ocsns wh William Giraldi 2008 preparatn for Giraldi’s say “A World Almost Rotten: The Fictn of William Gay, ” the only -pth cril analysis of Gay’s novels and stori. We offer Giraldi’s say for the legn of Gay’s heartbroken fans, and for those lucky on who are about to disver for the first time this important voice Amerin fictn.

And yet spe O’Connor’s strong prence (and the unavoidable prence of the Yahweh of Southern lerature, the god om whom no male wrer the South n ever hope to flee) Gay’s work is wholly s own, pulsg wh both tradn and novelty. His parents ntemplated the boy as somethg of an anomaly; although Gay was the first the fay to fish high school, his mother and father weren’t sure that wrg was a pnt choice of occupatn. Gay nsirs this gift the turng pot of his life: Wolfe’s novel igned him to his re; proffered him the sight that this n be done, that a wrg life for him was not a dnken pipe dream.

WILLIAM GAY BOOKS IN ORR

It allotted Gay the nfince to tell the stori of his own experience and the certa knowledge that those experienc were valuable even though they lacked privilege and swagger.

Gay’s “The Paperhanger” temps you to classify , expla , wonr at s majty and terror—the story is “The Tell-Tale Heart” wrten by the bastard offsprg of Wilkie Colls and Charl Manson, a prose part Hebrew Bible, part Hemgway—and then fi such feeble attempts at prehensn, at rctn. Gay’s story offers almost no rmatn about the characters: not where they e om, not their fevered dreams, not what they yearn for at first light.

In “The Paperhanger” we know only how the characters react the midst of an unexpected mystery, how their language reveals their warped psych, and wh that alone Gay enabl to know them for life, to taste their sweat. The send miracle: how Gay n massage your moraly to feelg miature sparks of sympathy for this child killer, a lonome and forsaken recle who spects that his own birth was a smic error. O’Connor acplish the same magic throughout A Good Man Is Hard to Fd, the story llectn Gay read as an adolcent; he bought the Sig paperback and knew—immediately, stctually—that they were the bt Amerin stori ever wrten.

WILLIAM GAY

Gay studied O’Connor the way an evangelil studi Genis, and om her brilliance he learned how short fictn is shaped, how a character n e alive jt a few l, and, more important, how to tell a story that matters.

When the novel The Long Home arrived the world a ago, William Gay was fifty-six years old and right away pared to both Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. They went to the Navy, to Vietnam, and then after the war to stts Chigo and Greenwich Village (Gay bumped to Janis Jopl at a pub). At a time when twenty-two-year-olds scribble sensatnal memoirs badly disguised as ser novels, humbl one to thk of William Gay Hohenwald, Tennsee, patiently tappg the keys of his typewrer for four s.

ORR OF WILLIAM GAY BOOKS

In Gay’s able hands the archetypal characters of The Long Home sprg to life as if for the first time: the young man on a qut; the gray sage who guis him; the ic sikick who aids him; the geo damsel who spir him; and the villa who tri to thwart him. This is ttament to Gay’s tremendo skill as a craftsman: his South ntas no rtoon drawgs, no simplistic Zoroastrian divisn of darkns and light.

The Long Home ow s tricy of assembly to The Sound and the Fury—the book Gay received om his high school teacher when he fished wh Look Homeward, Angel—and yet the novel never feels as nvoluted as Flkner’s bee Gay has a Dickensian aptu for nsely woven patterns of plot and character that here whout seam or effort. If Gay shar wh McCarthy a rich vernacular packed wh flare, he also mands sentenc posed of simple pennt cls stng together wh the njunctn “and, ” sentenc that would feel at home any of the Nick Adams stori.

Durg one of our numero phone nversatns, Gay clarified what first stck him about Flkner: “He took ordary people and gave them mythic dimensns.

” But of urse Gay knows that myth and folklore are tth, or at least one way of arrivg at tth: the stori we tell ourselv orr to live. Gay has an encyclopedic knowledge of McCarthy, as he do of Flkner, Wolfe, and O’Connor: he n rell scen and sentenc as easily as he n the nam of his children. Staggered by those early novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1978)—Gay fanned through a phonebook one afternoon and disvered that McCarthy’s number was there wag for him to dial .

McCarthy had no tert expoundg on his own work, but as soon as Gay mentned Flannery O’Connor, McCarthy perked up and was lighted to talk. They spoke by phone for a year and McCarthy rrpond wh Gay about the younger wrer’s stori; was the only feedback available for an isolated upstart. The publishg Mec’s ostensible distert new Southern voic—a mystery as profound as quantum mechanics nsirg that the Great Amerin Novel, Huckleberry Fn, is a Southern story—upled wh Gay’s remotens om anythg even remblg a terie of wrers, ma for dim prospects.