• 1 The quote is borrowed from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

1William Gay is a miraculously gifted writer—a writer who knew how to extract gems from a world where “[n]othing is like it used to be, lady. . . . The world’s almost rotten” (O’Connor, Complete Stories 146).1 “The Paperhanger,” which is one of his best-known short stories, perfectly illustrates how Gay appropriates southern noir and develops his own powerful version of Tennessee noir. First published in the February 2000 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “The Paperhanger” was then included in the 2002 collection of short stories entitled I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, “the same year Gay also published his second novel, Provinces of Night, and approximately a year after the publication of his first novel, The Long Home” (Bryant 307). “The Paperhanger” therefore emerged from the core of Gay’s most fruitful and successful creative years.

• 2 Personal email, 6 Feb. 2023.
• 3 While most biographical information used in this section is borrowed from William Gay’s website, up (...)
• 4 A note found in Gay’s papers describes the intense revelation of reading Look Homeward, Angel for t (...)
• 5 Cormac McCarthy, who passed away in June 2023 as this contribution was being revised, was indeed kn (...)
• 6 According to Giraldi, the two of them certainly “shared in their work a violent vision of a postlap (...)

4Introducing William Gay’s all too brief career as a writer may be needed as it turns out that his work has not yet caught the attention it deserves. There are about a dozen articles, reviews, and interviews devoted to Gay and his work—and that is about all. As his old friend Ron Rash puts it, “Gay is so underestimated.”2 William Gay was born in Hohenwald, Tennessee, where he spent most of his life. The place served as a model for his own apocryphal county, Ackerman’s Field and the Harrikin. Hohenwald is also the place where he passed away in February 2012. From an early age, Gay would write as soon as he had a minute, “writing in spiral-bound notebooks, filling them with his handwriting on both sides of the pages” (White), but he also spent his whole life working, off and on, at odd jobs (as a mechanic or on construction sites)—jobs which he would abandon as soon as there was enough money to provide for a family of six and pay for a few bills.3 He received little formal education, but he was an avid reader: “He was reading everything he could get his hands on and he quickly gravitated away from the popular detective and mystery novels and the southern exploitation novels that depicted the south full of moonshiners, sexual perverts and racist gangs” (White). Besides pulp fiction, he also admiringly read Thomas Wolfe,4 Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and eventually “stumbled on a book by Cormac McCarthy in a junk store in Hohenwald”—it was Outer Dark, McCarthy’s second novel. By the time Gay had read McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, he had recognized the voice of his master, “thrilled to find someone with a style comparable to the greats he so much admired who was writing about the people and places in rural Tennessee” (White). The master would also become his friend: the story has it that one day he actually “called information for Knoxville and asked if there was a Cormac McCarthy listed and, to his amazement, they gave him a phone number. He called the number and was in shock when Cormac answered the phone” (White). This is how the two men struck up the unlikeliest literary friendship—a relationship that very little is known about, McCarthy being even more secretive than Gay ever was, but which is celebrated in a letter now hanging in a frame in Ron Rash’s house, a letter that Rash bought from Gay’s beneficiaries for fear it would end up in the junk.5 What the letter written in McCarthy’s penmanship reveals in substance is how much he admired Gay’s writing, a rare compliment in many respects.6

• 7 Giraldi convincingly remarks that Gay’s “South contains no cartoon drawings, no simplistic Zoroastr (...)

9The trajectory of the noir fiction protagonist is simple enough: he is doomed, but he is oddly at peace with his fate. Uninterested in redemption, he is the catalyst for all possible thematic and stylistic excesses—an observation that immediately brings to mind Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, the collection of stories he published in 2008, perhaps the best example of this strange infusion of doom, determinism, and dark humor. The eponymous paperhanger in Gay’s story is an ordinary blue-collar worker with a taste for San Miguel (“Paperhanger” 90, 92), a special beer brand he drives miles to purchase as a memento of his war experience. He is a lone wolf; he lives in a secluded cabin, and he appears to have developed an odd taste for abandoned cemeteries and the morbid tales associated with them. “Did [he] or did [he] not” (89) kill before the story that is told in “The Paperhanger”? The question remains unanswered. What is for sure, though, is that Zeineb’s killing—an impulsive, unpremeditated gesture, maybe the dramatic result of his silent rage against her mother, against social inequities and class contempt—turns him into a murderer, propelling him “into a downward spiral” from which there is, indeed, no escape.7 A quite ordinary man with a regular job at the beginning of the tale, he is described “heading west into the open country, tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore” (92) at the end.

• 9 Bryant considers that Gay thereby “subtly link[s] class stratification, footman/fool and king, with (...)

14These few lines are fraught with hints: they identify the crime as a child’s “vanishing” “in broad daylight,” making it rather implausible while imbuing the passage with eerie undertones. From the start, the wife’s existence (she remains unnamed throughout the narrative) is dwarfed between two genitives that contain her existence between husband and child, thus anticipating the fact that the storyteller will deny her any form of independence beyond that initial identification. The very fact that she should be referred to through a noun phrase operating as a determiner, “the doctor’s wife’s child,” whereas, with hindsight, it appears that at that very moment, abandoned to a bottomless solitude, she has neither husband nor child left, is morbidly ironical. What’s more, her characterization through “a pitcher of silica-dry vodka martinis” encapsulates her deterioration, while delineating the desolating narrowness of her life after “the disappearance,” which seems to consist in remembering and getting drunk in order to forget. The third-person narrator’s play with shifting perspectives begins right away: indeed, throughout the story, the narration intermittently merges with the wife’s or with the paperhanger’s perspectives (once with the husband’s), without prior notice. Readers are thus immersed within the sickly perceptions of characters that everything opposes. Finally, the incipit sets the specific tone of the short story, which evokes a “cataclysmic” crime and its tragic consequences through imagery introducing an odd sense of distance. “[T]he events preceding the disappearance,” which are indeed about to be “replay[ed]” for the readers’ sake, are characterized as being simultaneously commonplace (“tawdry and banal”) and extraordinary (“freighted with menace”); they are of a dual, ungraspable, nature that echoes the very nature of William Gay’s writing style, which, as suggested by the incipit’s final simile, is marked by a singular playfulness. As the looming sense of threat preceding the child’s disappearance is compared with “a footman or a fool preceding the king into a room,” the narrator implicitly posits the modalities of his art: hesitation (footman or fool?), uncertainty (a king?), self-referentiality (together with the verb “replay,” the expression is suggestive of a play), and an unlikely sense of humor.9

• 10 “He had returned to Pakistan to find a wife befitting his station” (78). He picked up the greatest (...)

15The second paragraph introduces the readers in medias res to the paperhanger—unnamed too, but enjoying heroic status as eponymous character—who is kneeling in one of the mansion’s rooms, “smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel,” with the wife, “standing directly behind [him]” (72). This spatial configuration is fraught with hints whose signification is soon unveiled. The place is a big mansion that is being renovated by various tradesmen who, as the story starts, put the finishing touches to the interior decoration: there is a builder, an electrician, a backhoe operator and, of course, the paperhanger—all men, forming a small crew dominated by a woman, the doctor’s wife, who has no clue about what they are doing yet addresses them in a haughty and faulty English. She and her husband are wealthy Pakistani and while his English is flawless because he studied surgery at Princeton (77), hers has not had time to adjust yet: section 5 actually makes it clear that the wife is but a pretty Pakistani acquisition meant as a vitrine (78).10 While in her husband’s presence the doctor’s wife appears to be particularly submissive—as he blames her for not taking care of their child, “she cover[s] her face with her palms and weep[s]” (77)—when on her own, she is allowed to become an altogether different woman, deriving an obvious sense of pleasure, a sense of pride, from the assertion of the power of money.

• 11 Paradoxically, this is the sole, rather uncomfortable, vision of Zeineb the reader is provided with (...)

16From the start, the wife, who is but a wife, is either depicted haggling with the tradesmen—“You tell me double-bolt price but you are installing single-bolt rolls. . . . It is cost me perhaps twice as much” (73)—, while money is clearly not an issue for them, or showing obvious signs of impatience: “The builder was a short bearded man dancing about, showing her features of the chandelier, smiling obsequiously. She gave him a flat angry look. She waved a dismissive hand toward the ceiling. Whatever, she said” (74). Flippant and disrespectful, the doctor’s wife is anything but a sympathetic character. As early as the beginning of the story’s second paragraph, the narrator mentions that “[s]he had been quarreling with the paperhanger” (72); as suggested by the use of the past perfect continuous, tension has been brewing. While pestering him, the doctor’s wife also ogles at him: she is clearly not impervious to his virile charms, in which Dr. Jamahl, “a short portly man with a benevolent expression” (78), seems to be lacking. With “his pale blue eyes” (73) and “shoulder length” hair, “the color of flax” (72), the paperhanger is as exotic to the doctor’s wife as she is to him. He is an obvious object of fascination: while the wife is described “bemusedly” (73) examining the man’s smooth, tanned, downy arms, “corded with muscle” (72), her daughter Zeineb is young enough to express her own innocent attraction to the fair-haired creature by playing with his hair, somehow fulfilling some of her mother’s guilty desire by proxy.11 As the paperhanger is still working on his knees, in a posture deriding submissiveness to the powerful, “the height differential between an adult male and a four-year-old child is inverted, placing the paperhanger in a subordinate, passive relation to both mother and child” (Bryant 310).

• 12 The telescope imagery turns out to be an O’Connor favorite (it appears in “The Lame Shall Enter Fir (...)

17It is clear enough that the mother and daughter’s partiality to the paperhanger is only one of the many similarities between them. They are ominously envisioned as twin figures, spitting images of one another: “She was a scaled-down clone of the mother, the mother viewed through the wrong end of a telescope” (“Paperhanger” 73).12 The narrator continues: “and the paperhanger suspected that as she grew neither her features nor her expression would alter, she would just grow larger, like something being aired up with a hand pump” (73). In retrospect, the odd mix of irony and black humor that characterizes this last remark is particularly compelling: the simile evokes an inflatable plastic doll and the cheap and bawdy eroticism that goes with it, thus projecting the underlying sexual tension between the wife and the paperhanger onto the child. It also reverses the paperhanger’s current task as “he knelt smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel” (72), as mentioned earlier, which the wife does not understand and later reproaches him with: “And you are leave lumps, the doctor’s wife said, gesturing at the wall” (73). There is, of course, a straightforward opposition between the literal inflation of the odd simile (as in: the action of inflating something) and the deflation (as in: “smoothing air bubbles out”) induced by the paperhanger’s task. His retort to the pestering wife heightens the ambiguity of the moment: “Everything will shrink down and flatten out” (73), he repeats twice enigmatically, voicing a double-edged motto that brings to mind Flannery O’Connor and one of her intriguing short story titles, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Zeineb, who will never grow beyond her present size (though no one is aware of this yet, not even her murderer), is about to shrink enough to fit in the paperhanger’s toolbox and, indeed, literally “flatten out.”

• 13 The original title of the story was “The Paperhanger, the Doctor’s Wife and the Child Who Went into (...)
• 14 Meanwhile, “ruminative” (76) Sheriff Bellwether cannot help recalling McCarthy’s ruminating Sheriff (...)

20From the moment her mother calls her from her car for them to go home—“When she cranked the engine its idle was scarcely perceptible. She powered down the window. Zeineb, she called” (74)—, the girl is gone into the abstract.13 From then on, the arrogant privilege which has characterized the doctor and his wife’s luxurious life, encapsulated by their pricy cars—she has “a silver-gray Mercedes her husband had given her for their anniversary” (74), he owns “a sleek black Lexus” (76-77)—, by their taste for chandeliers, French doors and verandas, and by the fact they can afford hiring numberless workers, proves completely useless. As the place and the neighboring woods are searched by the law for hours that turn into days over the first four sections of the short story, the doctor’s wife’s bossy management of the workers yields to “panic” (75). At the end of the long vigil in the course of which crowds of men, neighbors and policemen search for the missing child, her very disappearance is described in fantastic terms that somehow evoke Goya’s famous painting “Saturn Devouring his Son”: “whatever monster, man or beast, would snatch up a child in its slaverous jaws and vanish, prey and predator, in the space between two heartbeats” (79). The unbearable horror of facts thus yields to a powerful fantasy. Meanwhile, as the darkness of the atmosphere becomes more and more pervasive, submerging both space and minds—in section 2, “dark was gathering and seeping across the field like a stain” (76), in section 3 “[f]ull dark had fallen” (77)—, the text is permeated with the lexicon of disappearance: terms like “vanished” (75) and “eliminate” (77) are gradually imbued with ominous undertones. It is soon overtaken by the recurrence of the word “search,” used either as a verb or as a substantive, from the second half of the first section till the end of the fourth as “[t]he earth . . . was worn smooth by the useless traffic of the searchers” (79). While the ineptitude of the law is epitomized by Sheriff Bellwether’s repetition of his vain mantra—another probable wink at O’Connor—, “Everything has got to be considered” (80-81),14 one cannot help noticing that the atmosphere of the search is marked by a sense of inadequacy: “A motley crowd of curiosity seekers and searchers thronged the yard. There was a vaguely festive air” (77). While pointing out the morbid inquisitiveness of ordinary mankind, this description is reminiscent of the metaphor of the “emotional barbecue” that occurs in William Faulkner’s Light in August in the evocation of the crowd watching the fire of Joanna Burden’s house (289). As for the paperhanger, he pretends that he is searching the missing child with the others, “watch[ing] all this with a dispassionate eye” (“Paperhanger” 77).

• 15 Likewise, when the backhoe operator suggests, for yet another unexplained reason, the sheriff shoul (...)

21As the police investigation accumulates false leads or follows the wrong leads—the sections (2 and 4) devoted to the search are actually characterized by their brevity and their vacuity—, irony is again blatant. While ineptly centering his inquiry on the backhoe operator—an error of judgement that is repeated when the FBI experts take the affair in their hands, resorting to “every very modern crime-fighting device the government possessed” (81)—, the high sheriff dismisses the paperhanger all too quickly: “I had to look, he said apologetically,” after searching the paperhanger’s pickup truck. “Of course you did, the paperhanger said” (77).15 In passing, Gay jokes at the trappings of “regular” crime stories. “Where is the law? In Gay’s world, the law lies impotent and shriveled on the other side of town. It can be skirted without much effort or else ignored altogether” (Giraldi 334). The overall sense that then derives from the story is one of wasted efforts, which is further reflected in the abandoned house: “Work ceased on the mansion” (“Paperhanger” 81), “The half-finished veranda’s raw wood grayed in the fall, then winter, rains. The ditches were left fallow and uncovered and half filled with water. Kudzu crept from the woods. The hollyhocks and oleanders the doctor’s wife had planted grew entangled and rampant” (82). While nature inexorably regains its territory, stifling and annulling attempts of conquest, the aggrieved couple sink into despair and affliction—into a darkness all the more bottomless as Zeineb is never found, and they are offered no explanation for her disappearance. As the beginning of section 5 indicates, the parents are abandoned to their tragedy:

• 16 One cannot help noticing the recurrence of the doll imagery.

22“The Paperhanger” is fraught with such compelling reflexive moments—noir indeed—, not only about the loss of a child, which is terrible enough, but even more powerfully about being deprived of the very possibility of mourning. The way negative clauses and forms intertwine with tentative attempts to name Zeineb’s absence shape the parents’ sense of helplessness: the ternary succession of mundane images, “a page turned, a door closed, a lost ball in the high weeds,” is harrowing.16 Unable to mourn together, they end up splitting and experiencing inexorable solitary downfalls into liquor: she literally dissolves into “vodka martinis” (82), he into a “bottle of J&B” (82, 83). And “[t]hat was all” (81).

• 17 The harvest moon is another ironic image, as it is usually associated with a time of climax and fru (...)
• 18 “edging over the ridge where the ghost of a road was, a road more sensed than seen” (87); “like the (...)

24The two of them then start the most improbable conversation over their respective drinks: first they both acknowledge how much things, including themselves, have “changed” since Zeineb disappeared; then she soon asks him to take her to the woods “to search for [her] child’s body” (85), offering to pay him for his service, as she has always done. Similarly, the object of the search has by then undergone a dramatic change: the doctor’s wife (she is still referred to this way though the doctor has long gone from her life) no longer hopes to find her child, but merely her remains. The two characters’ eerily quiet and peaceful exchange is all the more disquieting as it brings to mind the tension that permeated all their previous exchanges, thus confirming Giraldi’s assessment that “‘The Paperhanger’ tempts you to classify it, explain it, wonder at its majesty and terror . . . and then defies such feeble attempts at comprehension, at reduction. The story breathes, enigmatically, as if just born. It offers almost no information about these characters: not where they come from, not their fevered dreams, not what they yearn for at first light” (332). Such unlikely contrasts, together with the persisting sense of inadequacy, contribute to the gothic aesthetics of the tale. Together with the rainy autumn sense of gloom, the presence of crows, the hopeless search for a child’s corpse near an abandoned house, traces of the southern gothic are, indeed, to be found throughout the story. As many other contemporary southern writers, Gay seems to relish revisiting the genre. Among the southern gothic topoi “The Paperhanger” is fraught with are the haunted house with “an unhealthy, diseased reputation” (82), the “abandoned graveyard” where the paperhanger has taken a liking to digging up graves in order to “examin[e] with curiosity what remained” (79), “a harvest moon” (91),17 and an overall sinister atmosphere prone to apparitions: “From the corner of the ruined veranda a child was watching him” (87). In this eerie scenery, even roads and insects tend to turn into ghosts;18 the limits between reality and dark phantasmagories, here and there, life and death, are thus distorted: “The line between grave robbing and archaeology has always looked a little blurry to me,” the paperhanger admits (88).

• 19 Is it a chance that “martini” should be the third three-syllable word in /m/ entering into this con (...)

25The paperhanger himself appears to be the very product of southern gothic: for one thing, he shows a striking proclivity for gothic stories. He actually tells the doctor’s wife two stories: one about “a man named David Lang” who “just vanished. Went into thin air” (86), the other about killing or not killing his unfaithful wife (88-89). Of course, the two embedded gothic stories echo with the tale at hand—the first is about vanishing without explanation, the second hints at the paperhanger’s being a murderer: “Did I or did I not, he said” (89). They also evoke a sense of spiraling continuity between Gay’s use of the genre and the tradition from which it sprouts. What’s more, the paperhanger is often described with the most disconcerting smile, either “smiling” (73) eerily while there is apparently nothing to smile about, or “smil[ing] philosophically to himself” (79). His philosophical demeanor—“He seemed philosophical, possessed of some hard-won wisdom” (92)—prompts him to launch into morbid, though realistic, tirades about finitude: “A grave is the best place to dispose of a body. . . . The grave is its normal destination anyway” (89). As noted by Giraldi, the paperhanger’s elusiveness, his indeterminate nature—“whatever monster, man or beast” (79)—certainly contributes to the story’s perplexing mysteriousness: “The paperhanger is simultaneously ominous sprite and Everyman. What psychological explanation does Gay give for the paperhanger’s crime? None—not boyhood trauma or possession by devils—because he knows that such explanations are trite, exhausted, imaginary, that human beings commit acts of abrupt barbarity that no therapist, no writer, can ever adequately explain” (Giraldi 332). It is therefore no wonder that the final equation should associate the “mystery” (“Paperhanger” 85) of vanishing “into thin air” (86) or “walk[ing] off into the abstract” (89) with the desperate hope for “a miracle” (86, 92)—two words densely imbued with an O’Connor tang, which keep echoing in the last pages of the short story.19

• 20 In each quotation, the emphasis is mine. Gay’s version of the Virgin is not only “ravaged” (78), sh (...)

27The most unlikely, the most striking, aspect of southern noir stories probably lies in their inherent hybridity, as elements connected to crime fiction interweave with the southern gothic aesthetics, with a delectably dark humor and with a sharp awareness of the sensuous materiality of language that is akin to poetry. In “The Paperhanger,” poetic lulls take the form of evanescent tableaux. The short story is indeed scattered with words pertaining to the lexicon of painting: “The sun was low in the west and bloodred behind this tableau and man and tractor looked flat and dimensionless as something decorative stamped from tin” (74), “He had a moon-shaped face, with light and dark areas of skin that looked swirled, as if the pigments coloring him had not been properly mixed” (78), “The paintbrush flew away and speckled the dark rose walls with antique white” (79). With their emphasis on the tools, forms and properties of painting, such examples simultaneously refer to the paperhanger’s job—his domain is ironically interior designing; he both hangs wallpaper and paints walls—and to the writer’s own painterly sensitivity to colors and light effects (as mentioned earlier, Gay was also a painter), which imbues this dark tale with a singular poetry and an obvious self-referential quality: “He studied this tableau, then went out of his house for the last time” (92), the last tableau contemplated consisting in the iconoclastic rendition of the (ravaged) virgin with (frozen) child.20

• 21 “He had made an incision to remove a ruptured appendix and the incised flesh was clamped aside whil (...)

28Yet, unlike this last, most ghastly, vision, poetic tableaux in “The Paperhanger” are usually impregnated with a sense of beauty that sharply contrasts with the overall tenor of the plot. The narrator indeed displays a keen sensitivity to the varying nuances of light and their effects upon the perceived world, as in the following examples (respectively borrowed from sections 2, 5 and 6) which, more often than not, literally come out of the blue: “dark was gathering and seeping across the field like a stain” (76), “He would study the window, where the light drained away in a process he no longer had an understanding of” (83), “Dusk was falling like a shroud, the world going dark and formless the way it had begun” (86). While, together with the verb drained, recurring -ing forms reflect the process of light waning, similes further accentuate both the increasing opacity and the story’s deadly undercurrent. The image of the stain echoes Doctor Jamhal’s first appearance in the narrative: “The doctor still wore his green surgeon’s smock and it was flecked with bright dots of blood as a butcher’s smock might be” (77), as well as the scene, a few pages later, of the awfully botched operation that marks the bloody end of his career as a surgeon—undoubtedly an exercise in butchery.21 The image of the shroud triggers an eschatological consideration about the world’s beginning and ending that mirrors the paperhanger’s constant awareness of the “common end” of all journeys.

• 22 Yeats and Fitzgerald are indeed successively winked at, first when Doctor Jamahl assesses his situa (...)

31There is a tale told among southern writers (Gay actually first told the story to Ron Rash, who passed it along to David Joy, etc.) according to which when “The Paperhanger” first came out, Gay’s then girlfriend was so horrified by it that she left him on the spot. Placing a chilling infanticide at the core of a short story is certainly not a casual choice. Yet if “The Paperhanger” is so startling, it is not merely because of its darkness: there is so much more to this story. What about a plot crime that completely eludes the criminal’s motives, leaving readers with their own shaky assumptions? What about the displacement of the usual crime trappings onto the overall atmosphere, whose descriptions are couched in an unlikely poetic language? What shall be made of a crime story that bristles with so many intertextual hints that both anchor it within the tradition of the southern gothic and considerably broaden its scope—including W. B. Yeats and F. Scott Fitzgerald—in a curiously playful fashion?22 What about a fiction character that declares “I think most books are lies. Perhaps all books” (86) and a murdered girl that is so insistently referred to as a doll?