Fugitives of the Heart is the last of William Gay’s posthumous, stolen novels. You can read the story about that in the introduction by Sonny Brewer, a welcome addition to the literature on Gay.
At base, Fugitives is a coming-of-age story. Marion Yates is fifteen-year-old, the fatherless son of a part-time prostitute in the hills of the deep South. Though mired in poverty, Yates has has other things on his mind: that pocketknife in the general store, that girl who came to stay above the Muledick Saloon, seeing that big cat at the circus. He becomes friends with a black man named Crowe and cares for him after a mining accident. The two develop a wary relationship.
Enough has been written about Fugitives of the Heart as an homage to Huckleberry Finn, so I’ll let readers find that elsewhere. Gay’s writing here is exactly what you’ve come to expect. His lyrical descriptions of nature and decadence remain unmatched. Marion accepts the facts of a world overpopulated with scavengers, bootleggers, dissemblers, and villains while trying his best to find a way forward, out of this depressing landscape, to something of a future. It’s not pretty, but it’s really fantastic.
As a minor complaint: it’s complex to criticize a book posthumously edited and published. Depending on the personnel involved, they may have been reticent to make any but the most obvious edits, or made wholesale changes depending on their relationship and experience with the author. I think there was a bit of redundancy early in the novel that might have been better smoothed out, but I don’t know if this was a hands-off editorial approach to the existing manuscript, or the felt need to pad the already thin novel.
Overall, Fugitives of the Heart is darkly funny, occasionally bawdy, frequently threatening, and unsentimentally thoughtful; an welcome addition to Gay’s body of work.
