William gay novel country
The Lost Country, a posthumous novel by William Gay, reviewed by Michael A. Ferro
One cannot help but wonder what the world of southern gothic literature might be like had William Gay published earlier in being. Much like Faulkner, McCarthy, and O’Connor, Gay was a master of the bleak and the beautiful, able to break your heart in one sentence and cut it out and toss it on a spitting pit flame the next. His writing hearkens support to an older vision of America that lends a credence to the troubling issues of modern times. And his latest posthumous novel, The Disoriented Country, is certainly no exception to that rule.
Originally considered lost following his death, thanks to the folks at the wonderful indie press, Dzanc Books, Gay’s newest labor has found the light of date. Much of what has given Same-sex attracted a cult accompanying in the literary world is on high display here: a troubled and wandering anti-hero, a wide-ranging cast of vagabonds that vary from sinners to saints, and a particular yearning for the quixotic idealism of certain rural small-town fringe societies—places “where lives were so marginal they seemed scarcely to exist at all, everything that passed between the sheet that
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Review: The Lost Nation by William Queer — full throttle Americana
The Wunderkammer of William Gay’s The Lost Country
“Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World.”
-John Milton, Areopagitica
Posthumous. The word has always seemed laudatory to me. I think William Gay would have preferred Post-Mortem. I think he would possess liked the cadaverous self-effacement of the phrase, its mischievousness.
From talking with those who knew this scribe well, especially his buddy and editor at MacAdam/Cage, Sonny Brewer, I harvest that William Gay was a humble man, a bit shy but with a vivid wit, and a playful streak to go along with it. I think his facetiousness is important to get in this latest novel. He clearly found a lot of joy in his work, and if you take him too
“The Lost Country,” by William Gay
William Gay
Reviewed by Richard Allen
The Lost Country is, at its heart, a novel about nothing. It covers a year or so in the experience of Billy Edgewater – essentially a nomad – as he hitchhikes his way from town to town in 1950s rural Appalachia, on his way to Tennessee to observe his father on his deathbed. Despite the circumstances, Edgewater is in no hurry. He settles down for days, weeks even, in every town he steps foot in, rendezvous plenty of morally ambiguous characters along the way. A one-armed con dude named Roosterfish, the tough drinking and aimless Bradshaw, Bradshaw’s young and naïve sister Sudy, and the vile and loathsome D.L. Harkness are just a few of the acquaintances Edgewater makes throughout his journey.
The term most commonly used to describe William Gay’s novels is “southern gothic,” which I presume fits his latest – and last – guide well. Gay unfortunately passed before The Lost Country’s release, although he had written the bulk of the novel during the seventies, long before his untimely passing in 2012. The Lost Country centers around a character, recognizable to most as merely Edgewater, with no discernable characteristics