William Gay

Links:

 

Interview with William Gay: http://www.oxfordamerican.org/interviews/2009/nov/04/featured-writer-month/

 

Book Review of one of Gay's novels: http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-William-Gay/dp/1596920580

 

William Gay reads from one of his books: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySEZTFBzvXM

 

Another interview with William Gay: http://litreactor.com/interviews/an-interview-with-william-gay

 

Video interview with William Gay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1L7AMjjEBM

William Gay’s I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down

            At first glance the short stories in William Gay’s collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down seem incredibly different from each other, but there are many threads that Gay uses to tie his stories together.  Some common threads in Gay’s work are his use of psychic distance, his very ordinary characters, and his use of shocking incidents at the beginnings and ends of his stories.

            In every story in his collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Gay uses a psychic distance that allows us to see into one or two characters’ thoughts and no one else’s.  Usually Gay only gives the reader insight into one character’s thoughts, but in “The Paperhanger” the reader is privy to not only the thoughts of the paperhanger, but also of the doctor’s wife, and even the doctor’s for a short while.  Gay usually begins his stories at a psychic distance of three or four (according to John McNally’s analysis of psychic distance).  For example, the first line of the first story in the collection, “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” is “When the taxicab let old man Meecham out in the dusty roadbed by his mailbox the first thing he noticed was that someone was living in his house” (Gay 1).   This story starts with a psychic distance of four, and the psychic distance remains at four or five throughout the story.  This is exemplary of most of the stories in Gay’s collection, although “The Paperhanger” starts with a psychic distance of two, but it very quickly switches to a psychic distance of four.

            With this fairly close psychic distance, the reader gets to know the main characters in Gay’s stories very well, and the first thing that is apparent about all of these characters is that they are very ordinary people who are living fairly ordinary lives.  In “A Death in the Woods,” Pettijohn is a factory worker who has a small house and is married—not usual character fodder.  Scribner, from “Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues,” is an old man who is stricken by Alzheimer’s disease.  Again, this is not the type of character that writers normally gravitate towards.  These two characters are not an anomaly in Gay’s stories, rather, they are the norm.

            While Gay’s characters are normal, the situations that they find themselves in are usually distinctively abnormal.  Old man Meecham comes back from a nursing home to discover that someone has moved into his house.  A dead man is found in the woods that Pettijohn owns.  Crosswaithe discovers that the girl who owes his boss money killed her father and has been collection his social security checks.  One day Scribner remembers committing a murder when he was younger.  Almost every story in Gay’s collection begins by shocking the reader with the circumstances that the ordinary characters find themselves in, and then Gay also ends his stories with another shocking incident right before the story ends.  The paperhanger gives the doctor’s wife her dead child back.  Karas tricks his ex-wife into stealing a little money and a lot of roadkill.  Finis commits suicide.  Whatever story, Gay’s characters manage to find themselves in extraordinary circumstances where many of them are completely at a loss as to what they should do.

            Gay’s uses of fairly close psychic distance and ordinary characters forced into extreme circumstances makes his stories incredibly poignant while still leaving the reader with a clear grasp on the humanity of the characters and of their reactions to their very unusual circumstances.  These commonalities between Gay’s stories tie them together while still leaving each story as its own unique piece of human life.