When Everything Is Strange, Nothing Is: On William Gay’s ‘The Lost Country’
Gay’s second posthumous novel is light on plot & characterization, but heavy on the author’s unique trademark prose & humor.
William Gay
Novel | 368 Pages | 5.8” x 8.8” | Reviewed: ARC
978–1–945814–52–5 | First Edition | $26.95
Dzanc Books | Ann Arbor | BUY HERE
The Lost Country is the second of William Gay’s posthumous works. Gay passed in 2012, and The Lost Country languished in publishing limbo for quite a while even before his death — to be rescued, finally, with another novel, Little Sister Death, by Dzanc years later. The Lost Country has been heralded as Gay’s opus, and the power and scope of such a work echo through the book, even if it doesn’t quite achieve that level with certainty.
The Lost Country is a rambling, semi-picaresque that follows, primarily, Billy Edgewater as he travels through Tennessee on his way home to a dying father. Recently discharged from the Navy, Edgewater hitchhikes and bums his way east, joining along the way a one-armed con man named Roosterfish — an O’Connor-type who manages virtue in the midst of his squalor. Edgewater himself occupies a more nebulous space despite being slightly more straight-laced than Roosterfish. He’s taciturn, a frequent drunk, and remotely burdened with enough ancient guilt that he can’t quite muster the time for his contemporary wrongdoings. Whether alone or together, Edgewater and Roosterfish get into frequent trouble in honest and dishonest pursuits, until they are accosted by a group of locals whom Roosterfish has conned at one time or another, and set to be whipped for their crimes. Edgewater manages a daring escape, and on down the road he meets Buddy Bradshaw, an affable young liar who brings Edgewater to his home (after a stint in jail) to his mother and sister, Sudy. The inevitable affair occurs, whereupon Edgewater and Sudy are married to avoid the shame of an unwed pregnancy. Haunting the pages up to this point, here and there (if a man with bullhorns on his pickup can be said to haunt anything) is D. L. Harkness, something of a slumlord and titan of what-little-industry-there-is around Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee.
There are the makings, here, of a strongly-plotted road novel that ends with the clashing of our deeply troubled heroes and their outsized villain. That’s not quite what The Lost Country is. Instead we have a novel that gets lost in its own weeds fairly frequently — though not always to the reader’s detriment. Gay is often at his best in this book, prose at times singing and his unique eye for bottom-dwelling humor front and center. But there is a preponderance of plotlessness in a novel with the trappings of plot, and these two features clash and counteract until the book is adrift in a milieu of characters with clear goals and desires and no gas to get them anywhere. There are frequent notes of Cormac McCarthy’s truly aimless Suttree here, with Edgewater standing in for the eponymous fisherman and Bradshaw doing a fair impression of the country mouse Harrogate. It’s a troubling comparison because it’s clear that Gay is not writing Edgewater to be any kind of hero or antihero — he is, almost unerringly, a bad person. Suttree, on the other hand, as irredeemable as he is in the eyes of society, at least keeps one side of his ledger in the black. What all this adds up to is a novel with competing drives and rarely sympathetic characters. That leaves the reader to appreciate Gay’s prose and humor, or little else. Luckily, those can be found in spades:
“His radar was infallible when applied to the presence of police cars and [… w]hen he pulled into the street the cruiser cranked to and eased along behind him. […] He’d been just a shape behind the wheel, stolid and inevitable as the rest of them and Roosterfish figured he’d come in a box stamped: one Southern smalltown cop. Nightstick and gun and attitude included.”
At one point, Roosterfish and Edgewater are hired on to “paint” a barn, when the paint is no more than fifteen cents of oil in a sprayer, and the pair have to beat a storm before their concoction slides right off and they lose their pay and hides. The scene is powerfully nerve-racking, Gay pairing the strength of the storm and the narrowness of their deceit extremely well:
“Edgewater clambered up the ladder and turned on the sprayer and when he glanced southwestward he was amazed by what he saw. The thunderhead had arisen until it loomed almost to the sun and even as he watched the sun was swallowed, hung like a rind of gleaming disc against the black cloud like an eclipse. There was a faint rumble of thunder, a mere suggestion of sound. There was already wind in the highest branches and there was a disquiet in the air. […] Edgewater moved over the hot tin like a man demented, spraying a poison green film over anything that moved in front of the nozzle and raising aloft to peer toward the approaching storm. The air was filling with flying bits of windtorn leaves [. …] The wind ballooned Edgewater’s shirt and trouser legs and tilted him askew.”
And, before they can make quite good their escape:
“[…] the paint lifted with a great near-liquid ripple and draped itself along the rim of tin, a vast green gelatinous fabric like a curtain closing some curious show, behind it the roof marvelously umber again [. …]”
But Gay frequently oversteps, as well. The reader becomes familiar with just how outlandish Gay wants these characters and their world to seem; every little detail is a moment and simile away from being arcane, perverse, and demented. It doesn’t matter what — gas pumps become ancient artifacts, a country store an “alchemical conjurement of the fates.” The break of day is “some obscure shift.” Sex, naturally, is obscene:
“her legs outflung like some beached life from the ocean depths, some grotesque beast dividing […] or yet some wanton sacrifice in a pagan rite [. …]”
Stretches of the book deserve this atmosphere — it’s true — but when everything is strange, nothing is.
Despite all this, if one can take his time and let go of the expectations of plot, look past the occasional fantastical air of Gay’s metaphor — and, admittedly, a jarringly old-fashioned allotment of female characters — then one can enjoy the hell out of The Lost Country. It’s difficult not to imagine what Gay might have done with a little more time — could he have struck a balance between the plot / plotlessness? Could he have given agency to the women present, as he’d done in other novels? The potential is here; one can feel it crackling, right under the page. It’s an energy that, perhaps, drove Gay to see the world he’d created as one in a liminal state, truly between worlds, truly arcane. That he was able to take the reader along with him into that place is a testament to his ability, and to his career.
