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Southern fiction is known, among other things, for its surreal mix of comedy and tragedy, and for its hyperbole. William Gay is a Tennessean, and lucky for us, it shows. PROVINCES OF NIGHT is the story of a young boy, abandoned by everyone who's supposed to love him, valiantly trying to become a good man despite the poor examples set for him by almost every male in the county. Fleming's strong, if vague, sense of right and wrong manages to hang on by its fingernails despite the devastating poverty and loss he has faced --- Fleming's father took off one night, gun in hand, headed for Detroit to find Fleming's mother, who ran off with a peddler. Such outrageous, backwoods-type situations are believable when told in Gay's sure, deep Southern voice.
Gay's prose is like a river at night: dark and murky, with a slow-but-steadily-pulling current. Nearly everyone over the age of 12, man or woman, carries a gun and a bottle of homemade whiskey, but Gay writes so convincingly that one becomes inured to the glutinous dialect and feels akin to even these desperate characters. Occasionally, his tone ventures too far from the humble place he's created in the novel, and he uses highfalutin' words that don't quite fit. Even so, he excels at painting a sepia-toned Tennessee landscape, written in a style that feels like a camera swooping in a slow-motion circle from the vantage point of a Tennessee country field. He restrains himself well when melodramatic words would cheapen a truly tragic moment, such as the time a sinful man's plane crashes into a cliff. The accident is preceded by the line, "and the thought of his frogfaced wife would be far away. Below he could see moonlight on the rocks, the fleeing shadows of clouds tracking darkly across the pale limestone, the strewn lights of a mountain town like spilled jewelry. The wall of the mountain rising to meet him looked as pale and smooth as a granite headstone."
Such is the death of a man. Gay seems to be implying that even the most flawed of human beings deserve a bit of dignity about their death. This regard for humanity is pervasive in the naïve thoughts and well-intentioned actions of the teenaged Fleming. No matter the banality or meanness of the circumstances, jewels can emerge from the rough. Fleming does, in his way, and so does Gay's novel.
--- Reviewed by Stephanie Sorensen
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