Provinces of night /

In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner urged future writers to remember "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing." Gay must have listened, because his second novel is a powerful story of honor, love, and other conflicts of the human heart. E. F. Bloodsworth returns to his dying hometown in Tennessee after 20 years away. His wife has grown old. His oldest child drinks and philanders up and down the East Coast, while his youngest child sits on his front porch, hexing the mailman. His middle son, Boyd, has left town to kill his wife's lover. Only Boyd's son, the bookish Fleming, gives E. F. his due respect. These two members of the cursed and broken Bloodsworth family, grandfather and grandson, must carve out some redemption in the little time they have left. The story that unfolds offers southern writing at its very finest, soaked through with the words and images of rural Tennessee, packed full of that which really matters, the problems of the human heart. --John Green

Like one of Wallace Stevens's best-known poems, Gay's (The Long Home) second novel begins with a jar on a hill in TennesseeDonly this one appears to contain tiny human bones. That's a suitably ominous prelude to the dark saga of the Bloodworth clan, which revolves mostly around 17-year-old Fleming, an aspiring writer trying to evade the family legacy of violence and self-destruction. It is 1952 and his father, Boyd, has left their decrepit mountain home "seventy miles back of Nashville" for Detroit, not to work in an automobile factory like the other "hillbillies" but to search forDand killDthe peddler who has run off with his wife. Meanwhile, Fleming's grandfather, E.F. Bloodworth, a blues musician, is on his way home after having suffered a "stroke of paralysis" 20 years earlier. His handsome Uncle Warren, a former war hero now at loose ends, is a dissipated womanizer with an even more dissolute and unstable son, and his Uncle Brady "witches" for water, tells fortunes and casts hexes on those who do him wrong. Even as the Tennessee Valley Authority is moving in to clear and flood their valley and bring in "the electricity," Fleming's relatives and neighbors live by the backwoods code of violence exemplified by E.F., a man whose exploits are legendary among the locals. Only Raven Lee Halfacre, the 16-year-old daughter of a promiscuous alcoholic and the "prettiest girl in a three county area," offers the boy a glimpse of another way of life. Fleming's name echoes that of one of Faulkner's most memorable characters, and Gay's prose resembles that of Faulkner at his most florid. His stylistic quirksDespecially his refusal to set off dialogue with quotation marksDtake some getting used to, but the pitch-perfect rendition of the cadences of Southern speech and deeply poetic descriptions of the landscape more than compensate. (Dec. 26) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

After a hugely successful debut with The Long Home, Gay delivers another remarkable literary powerhouse. Gay re-creates the sights and sounds of rural Tennessee, which soon becomes home for the reader. Home, in this case, is a place of great emotional turmoil as three generations of Bloodworths struggle to love and leave one another. All of the Bloodworths but young Fleming seem to be either crazy or on their way there. Fleming, however, is captivated by his infamous grandfather, a crusty, caustic blues guitarist, who after 20 years of wandering has returned to settle his affairs before he dies. Even as he struggles to understand his family's irreconcilable views of the old man, Fleming grows attached to him. It is through his grandfather's music that Fleming encounters the beautiful and careless Raven Lee, who offers him the only chance he has ever had to change his future. Full to the hilt with deeply engrossing characters and surroundings, this novel will surely capture the hearts and minds of any reader.DShannon Haddock, Bellsouth Corporate Lib. & Business Research Ctr., Birmingham, AL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.