FUGITIVES OF THE HEART

An unsupervised boy comes of age in 1940s Tennessee in Gay’s final posthumous novel.

Yates gives new meaning to the term hardscrabble childhood. One winter night, he wakes up to the sound of a wagon—“Sany Claus?” he thinks—but it’s just a man dropping off the corpse of Yates’ father, whom he was forced to shoot for stealing meat. “I aimed to fire over his head but he’s a purty tall feller,” the man explains. Yates’ mother is tubercular, and she pays for her medicine—and whatever else she requires—with sex. The surrounding community is hardly more nurturing. Yates once watched through the slats of a boxcar while one man murdered another with a shotgun. He’s involved in a long-standing feud with the local bootlegger, Granny Stovall, which started when he hit her with a shovel after he attempted to steal back a dead goat that once belonged to him. A rare role model is a Black miner named Crowe, who takes an interest in the boy and helps him purchase a knife with a stag’s head etched on the blade that Yates has long been eying. When Crowe is sidelined by a mining accident, Yates visits the man during his recovery and learns some of the miner’s hard-won knowledge. Left mostly to fend for himself, Yates spends his time hopping trains, sneaking into circuses, stealing chickens, and romancing Granny Stovall’s granddaughter. But the violence of his environment comes for everyone eventually, and it isn’t long before Yates finds himself caught up in it. “All these acts of violence seemed random,” he observes early in the novel, “but already he divined something unseen moving beneath the surface, bones and blood and nerves beneath the skin.” What sort of man will this boy turn out to be?

Gay is a master of his own brand of woodsy lyricism, mixing the colorful vernacular of his characters with deceptively elegant descriptions: “The train went on into the falling night past farmers and past rich fields heavy with corn, past weary sharecroppers who’d let night fall on them leading their mules from the darkening fields, past leaning clapboard shanties yellowlit against whatever prowled out there in the darkness.” The novel is episodic in its structure, which may have to do with the fact that it was assembled from Gay’s notebooks by a team of his friends (who have already added three other posthumous works to the author’s oeuvre). It will likely be viewed as a minor entry in the Gay canon, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fascinating read, in part because it riffs so directly on Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which were apparently foundational to Gay’s reading life. (As Tom and Huck witness their own funeral from the rafters, Yates peeps on the widow who takes him in while she’s bathing…and promptly crashes through the ceiling.) Despite its structural flaws, the writing always sings, and given this is the last of Gay’s unpublished novels, the reader will want to savor every word.

A surprising, vibrant final novel from a legendary Southern writer.