CompleteMartialArts.com - The Long Home
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $16.47
Your Save: $ 8.48 ( 34% )
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Manufacturer: MacAdam/Cage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781878448910
ISBN: 1878448919
Label: MacAdam/Cage
Manufacturer: MacAdam/Cage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 257
Publication Date: 1999-11-01
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Studio: MacAdam/Cage
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Editorial Reviews:
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In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to a human evil that is greater and closer at hand than any the boy can imagine - until he learns of it first-hand. Gay's remarkable debut novel, The Long Home, is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil who recognizes even as a child that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude , longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Classic Showdown
Comment: The Long Home, William Gay's 1999 debut novel is set in the deeply rural Tennessee of the 1940s, a time when most of its inhabitants were still isolated by a lack of automobiles and telephones. Amidst this isolation they often learned the hard way that local law enforcement officers were on the payroll of the highest bidder and that it was always best for a person to simply mind his own business and get on with his life rather than to try to right wrongs done to others. There could have been no more perfect an environment, of course, for someone with the nerve and the will to do whatever it took to profit at the expense of his neighbors.
Into this perfect environment appeared one Dallas Hardin, a man who would let nothing stand between him and what he wanted, even if what he wanted was another man's wife, home and business. He simply took those things and dared you to do anything about it. Those tempted to try to do something about Hardin knew that they would likely end up dead and that life would just go on without them. As a result, the evil that Hardin was continued to grow stronger by the year.
That is not to say that everyone closed their eyes when it came to Dallas Hardin and what he represented. Some, like old William Tell Oliver who lived nearby Hardin's dancehall, could hardly help observing some of the things that went on there when no one else was around, including vicious beatings and even murder. One or two, like young Nathan Winer whose father had his own run-in with Hardin, were willing to stand up to Hardin - up to a point.
A classic battle of good vs. evil was bound to happen when someone brave enough to take on Dallas Hardin finally had enough of his ways. Little did Nathan Winer think that by falling in love with Hardin's "stepdaughter" that he would be the one to trigger that confrontation or that he and old man Oliver would find themselves locked with Hardin in a fight to the finish.
William Gay's writing is like Cormac McCarthy's in that it deals with people who are trying to scratch a living from the land, dirt farmers, small ranchers, day laborers, bootleggers, and the women who have to depend on them. Gay's world is often bloody and violent, and like McCarthy, he goes where his story leads and does not soften or hide that violence by quickly moving on to the next scene. That willingness to face violence head-on is part of the makeup of Gay's characters and his readers should be prepared to do the same because this is one of the roughest coming-of-age novels that they are likely ever to encounter.
Since 1999 Gay has followed The Long House with two more novels and a collection of short stories. His work is firmly in the Southern Gothic mode, almost always set in the South of the 1940s and 1950s, and has drawn favorable comparisons to the work of McCarthy, Faulkner, O'Connor and Caldwell. Fans of that illustrious group might want to check out the work of William Gay to see what they have been missing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Standing Ovation
Comment: I read this book twice. First time was a couple years ago and I am glad I had the foresight to put it on my "do not lend" shelf. Having forgotten the story, I picked it up again last weekend and re-read it. I savored every word and found myself re-reading passages as the descriptions evoked every emotion from laughing out loud to pensive reflection. It was a gift, this writing, this story, these characters. Brilliant. Thank you William Gay.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb tapestry of Tennessee rural life half a century ago
Comment: The battle of good versus evil is woven through three-dimensional characters, young and elderly. Remorseless murderer Dallas Hardin worsens with age, stealing another's wife and trying to prostitute her daughter. Young Nathan Winer, whose father Hardin killed when the boy was very young, violently objects. Elderly William Tell Oliver knows secrets and knows exactly how to help Winer. The unhurried climax literally tightened my nerves until the most satisfying end. --Roy L. Fish, author of short stories and the suspense novel, ICEMAN.
Customer Rating:
Summary: THERE'S SHOT WHISKEY, AND THERE'S SIPPIN' WHISKEY...
Comment: Shot whiskey is the type that so strong and just plain nasty that throwing it down your throat in a (hopefully) single swallow is the only way to imbibe it and survive. Sippin' whiskey, on the other hand, while still packing a punch, is more artfully crafted, with all sorts of artful nuances there to savor - you want to take your time with it, so you can more fully appreciate the care with which it was made. William Gay's prose is sippin' whiskey - there's a strength within that will leave you reeling, but there are so many subtleties to be found as well. His characters are vivid and believable, and he brings them to life slowly, rather than burying the reader in a swamp of description. We get to know them as we would a person in our day-to-day lives, through their actions, conversations, and what thoughts they might care to share with us - it's an experience that makes reading this novel all the more precious and amazing. The descriptions that occur within these pages are subtle as well - his vocabulary is astonishing, and when he can't find a suitable word already in general usage, he constructs one (always to good advantage). Time after time, reading this incredible novel, I found myself going over a passage again and again, to make sure that I wasn't imagining the creative powers at work here. Gay's literary gifts are amazing - but he never uses them in such a way as to overpower his characters. The novel is set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s - and that time and place is firmly established within the first few pages. I felt transported as I read it. Gay lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee - and his knowledge of the area and the people, and his obvious empathy toward them, give his fiction a sense of reality that is both gentle and ferocious. Dirt farmers, laborers, bootleggers, lawmen (both honest and crooked), women and men old before their time, young people aching for something - anything - more than what they see around them, what they see as their future if they remain where they are. The story here is basically an old one - that of an evil presence in the midst of normalcy, ignored or tolerated by most of the citizens in the area, that slowly establishes itself as a power not to be questioned without dire retribution. What's the old saying? `Absolute power corrupts absolutely' - the mighty tend to fall mighty hard, and they seldom see it coming. The evil character in this novel - one Dallas Hardin, bootlegger, honkytonk operator, would-be pimp and many more unsavory occupations - is one of the most memorable baddies I've come across in some time. The evil within him is made palpable - you can feel it in the air, it will make your skin crawl - by William Gay's skill. I've already started reading his second novel, and I've got my eye on his collected short stories as well. Gay's work was recommended to me by another author - and it's a recommendation for which I'll be grateful for a long, long time. This is high magick.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Comment: A southern novel has never pulled me in like this before. I needed something to read and I was at a friend's house. I asked her what her favorite book on her bookshelf was and she gave me this one. I'm glad she did. The writing is so powerful, and so lyrical, that I could not put it down. Beyond that, the sentences are so rich, bursting with information, that no pages could be skipped. This is a story about the deep south, before everyone had telephones and automobiles, set in a remote area of Tennessee, a place with its own history and its own rules. You will not regret reading this book.
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