Lost Country

May 21, 2018
Gay (1941-2012) reaffirms his Southern Gothic virtuosity in this dark, brooding tale of worn-out poor folks in the small towns and backwoods of rural Tennessee in 1955. Billy Edgewater is a discharged Navy veteran hitchhiking home to see his dying father. Billy, however, is a hard luck case—broke, aimless, and not interested in a family reunion. Once back in Tennessee, he falls in with Roosterfish,
a one-armed con man who scams poor people, runs bootleg liquor, and is obsessed with revenge on thieving, cheating bully D.L. Harkness. Billy and Roosterfish’s scams and constant drunkenness get them into scrapes with the law, bar patrons, angry husbands, lonely wives, and predators smarter and more ruthless than them. Billy continues to make bad decisions: he gets a girl pregnant, marries her, and settles into a married life he hates. Bootlegging and theft are more to his liking. When Roosterfish asks Billy to join him in a robbery and murder plot, Billy has one more bad decision to make. Gay’s intense portrayal of the economic despair of 1950s rural Tennessee is authentic and gripping.

T. Ryder Smith narrates this dark Southern Gothic involving an estranged son recently discharged from the Navy, a shameless con man, and an unbalanced brother and sister. Billy Edgewater's journey east to visit his dying father in Tennessee is filled with atmospheric detail and strange, sometimes vulgar, encounters. Smith's performance is uneven, often marked by exaggerated Southern drawls that alternate between frenzied and boozy. That said, the material itself presents a challenge as it lacks delineation (it is without chapters), and Edgewater himself often withdraws without warning into dreamlike, often nightmarish, reverie, adding to the confusion and wandering pace. Smith nails the foreword and afterword, which recounts the curious biography of the author and his once-lost manuscript. Sadly, what lies between lacks coherence. A.S. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine