A review by michael_d_barnett
The Lost Country by William Gay

5.0

Aside from a few too many similes in long, ropey sentences, this novel is near perfect. It’s a tireless, bleak and violent picaresque about a drifter unable to face up to himself. It’s moody weight falls like a stone through spring to summer to winter, the trajectory of life without specific cause, although the author intimates that everything is preordained. This may be only an excuse for the lives of the characters lived without purpose, wayward and unmoored. The result is a portrait of a region and time realized with the exactitude of a photograph, one already fading in tone and curled at the edges.