THE LONG HOME

A moody first novel is offered as its gifted author’s claim to the regional-metaphysical mantle currently worn by Cormac McCarthy—though, in fact, it reveals the overpowering influence of Faulkner, particularly of the “Spotted Horses” chapter in The Hamlet. A terse Prologue recounts the murder in 1932 of tenant farmer Nathan Winer by itinerant thug Dallas Hardin, following an argument over a whiskey still. Then, 11 years later, in the dilapidated backwoods hamlet of Mormon Springs, Tennessee, an increasingly bleak drama is played out among the avaricious Hardin (now a prosperous landowner and small-time entrepreneur); Winer’s teenaged son and namesake; a reclusive old man named William Tell Oliver (who harbors his own guilty secrets); and a beautiful girl, Amber Rose, whom Hardin threatens to add to his ill-gotten holdings. The story—told in clipped, often enigmatic parallel scenes—emphasizes Oliver’s crafty momentum toward redemption, Nathan’s thwarted love for Amber Rose and dogged pursuit of vengeance, and the overreaching that brings their tormentor Hardin to a kind of justice. The Long Home (the phrase is an indigenous metaphor for death) contains several memorable scenes and striking characterizations (both Nathan’s dysfunctional comrade “Motormouth” Hodges and ex-football hero and town drunk “Buttcut” Chessor are amusing troublemakers). But the novel drowns in its own rhetoric, with risible abstractions (“she shrieked at the immutability of his back”) and pretentiously grotesque, and inexact, scene-setting (“The bare branches of the apple trees writhed like trees from a province in dementia”). Gay has read Faulkner with reverence (Dallas Hardin is a copy of the master’s immortal, insatiable carpetbagger Flem Snopes), and imitated him without a sense of when to stop—or much wit. When it emerges from the fog of verbiage, Gay’s debut tells a gripping and intermittently haunting story. If he ever decides to write his own novel, it may be a good one.