LITERATURE: provinces of night – Finale

Whew.  Should’ve been framing but I think I would have locked the shop doors once I got into the last 25 pages.

Somehow, the ending came full force and fast.  Almost a little too fast, as if the whole summer’s problems came to a head and got settled on a few days in November.  But the story is credible; though I originally questioned some of the events, after thinking about it, I can see where they were building up and things forgotten (a book that plays a role I completely missed), and E.F.’s belief in his imminent death as well as his nature did answer my questions.

One thing that may not have been missed by William Gay, but it stuck in my own head as an important detail that never panned out was this:

You have to wear this hardhat all the time you’re on the work site.
Have you not got another white one like you got?  Albright was licking the point of his pencil, studying Woodall’s hat.
These blue hardhats are laborer’s hats.  This one I got is a superintendent’s hat.  It might be a little early in the day for one of them.  I been here twenty years and I own the company. (p. 49)

That’s Albright signing on for a job with Woodall that turn’s disastrous and just the beginning of his troubles.  Then this, when he pays Brady to put a hex on Woodall to get him off his back:

I’ll need somethin of his.  Somethin he touched.
Albright rose and went through the front room. (…)Outside the yard was dappled with shadow and light, the moon was out now and curdled clouds ran before it as if in the keep of some enormous lunar wind.
He took the blue hardhat out of the back floorboard and for a moment just stood holding it, wondering how Brady could use it, trying to feel something of Woodall in its sleek metal surface. He put the hat on his head and stood remembering the hot metal through his shoes, the clicketyclack of the crimper.  He tried to think as Woodall might think.  Then in a moment of insight he saw himself as a fraction of the fool he was. (p. 101)

Gay makes a big deal of the white (Woodall’s) versus the blue (Albright’s) hat, and I suspected immediately that that’s where the curse could go terribly wrong.  Well it didn’t work that way and I wondered if Gay himself had forgotten about it.  Well, he didn’t; it was just much more subtle than I expected.

Gay’s writing is exquisite. Language lovers will enjoy the book for this alone. And I find I’m not alone in comparing him to Cormac McCarthy.  But McCarthy lovers (and I am one) won’t be put off by the similarity.  I think instead, they’ll be as happy as I was to discover another great writer.