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TWILIGHT It’s a bad business when the town’s sole mortician is a necrophiliac
who finds satisfaction in canoodling with corpses. Bad, too, when
this same town is home to a highly competent sociopath who had just
as soon insert a knife into a person’s belly as to
ask the time of day. These bad things become even worse, however, when
two such individuals (who despise each other)
form a compact to recover by any means necessary certain
stolen and rather tasteless photographs that tend to document the
proclivities of the above-mentioned
undertaker. (We are talking here about a man who takes joy in
mixing up body parts, burying garbage along with human remains,
and other practices that might be expected to excite the disapproval
of family members.)
The photos, as it happens, were removed by Kenneth Tyler, the novel’s central character, a fresh-faced and well-intentioned young man who seeks retribution for the treatment that was meted out to his deceased father, as also to a great number of other former fellow townspersons. To regain his cherished archive of photographs, the mortician is prepared to pay $15,000, a hefty sum in 1951. And he doesn’t have far to look to find someone willing to take on the job. For if Fenton Breece is the last person you’d want to have responsibility for your loved ones’ remains, Granville Sutter is the last human being you’d ever wish to irritate in any way whatsoever. A demonic and highly self-sufficient sort, this man can roll a cigarette, use a rifle, build a house, confute a jury, devise disguises, and track a person for days and nights through an unmapped country so wild that even a compass has no use. Can young Tyler evade his pursuer long enough to place his evidence in the hands of an honest lawman? For it is clear that anyone who can deal with such perils as Granville Sutter can bring to bear and yet still come out a decent human being must be considered to have passed life’s first great challenge. Not many people could write a book like this. It requires a detailed understanding of small town life and speech, of the southern mindset, southern landscape, and everything else. It requires an ear for dialog, a particular specialty of Mr. Gay’s. Indeed I am aware of no other writer, not excluding William Faulkner, who so consistently strikes just the right note in conversation and word play. And then, too, there is his vocabulary, an extensive one that he unveils in just the right places and never for its own sake alone. I was impressed. Impressed, too, that this man was ready to serve a thirty-year apprenticeship before breaking into print. It takes an autodidact to write prose like his, one who draws his inspiration from out of his own resources as opposed to campus courses or current fashions. He is, as a friend of mine has said, a “treasure,” and someone who, if things were as they should be, would have caused our American readers long before now to stop and reconsider the sort of material they have been investing in over the past half-century. --Tito Perdue |