The Year the Lights Came On (39 page)

After the publication of
The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876), Clemens generally treats life in midwestern rustic villages (the Missourian Hannibal-St. Petersburg matter) more bleakly, including the finally pessimistic implications of
The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
After the printing of
First Blood
(1953) and
The
Canyon
(19S3), Schaefer emphasizes more than ever before loneliness, haunting, aging, and death in faded western frontier settlements. After the appearance of
The
Year the Lights Came On,
Kay increasingly treats life in southern towns more desolately. Kay’s
After Eli
(1981) and
Dark Thirty
(1984) are very gloomy, if powerfully effective and memorable works with warranted violent endings. In
After
Eli
the murderous villain, an impersonator caught in his dream of finding some legendary buried treasure, consistently sees himself as a predestined artist who uses his imagination and manipulates the imaginations of others, including the retrospective imagination of memory, for evil purposes—a very different conception of the role of imagination and dream than that in
The Year the
Lights Came On.
As its title suggests,
Dark Thirty
is even more pessimistic in its exhibition of the tyranny of many kinds of violence over more creative uses of the imagination; depicted in this novel are “the complexities of [a] world” in metaphoric twilight; a world characterized by retardation and insanity as well as by the displacement of imaginative tradition and continuity; a world where human dignity necessitates the poetic (in lieu of the failed legal) justice of a “right answer,” including dire acts of countering violence—a very different sense of loss than that in
The Year the
Lights Came On.

Some of the darker features of Kay’s later novels could be forecast from his first novel, which suggests that even in Colin’s dream of reality there is meanness, abuse, and death, including the psychological loss which comes with the end of his dream, with his fall into time, and with the curtailment of the dynamics of the prospective imagination. But the extent to which Kay’s second
and third books darken and even turn away from the consolations of retrospective imagination is a surprise, albeit neither factor lessens the artistic merits of his later fiction.

Perhaps finally, if one may speak oxymoronically, the dire philosophic bleakness of these two later books of Kay’s only highlights the scintillating insight and evocative poignancy of his first novel.
The
Year the Lights Come On,
however neglected by literary critics, is an important, rich contribution to American literature. It is much more than a remarkably sensitive reminiscence of a child’s life in a rural town in Georgia in 1947. It is more than another excellent example of the regional thematic interests of latter-day southern American writers. A wonder-full romance,
The Year the Lights Came On
is a skillfully managed aesthetic statement about the nature of the imagination and its artful designs, a provocative work of art that is philosophically intellectual and, simultaneously, deeply felt, touchingly affective, and utterly unforgettable.

—
University of Texas, Austin, 1989

READER’S GUIDE

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Year the Lights Came On
is Terry Kay’s evocative tale of Colin Wynn, an twelve-year-old boy growing up in rural northeast Georgia. The year is 1947, and in Colin’s hometown of Emery, Route 17 divides the community into the haves and the have-nots—those with and without electricity. This boundary creates a common bond among Colin and the other members of the Our Side Gang in their frequent confrontations with their affluent neighbors, the Highway 17 Gang. But then the Rural Electrification Administration brings electricity to the homes of the less privileged and Colin boasts that the wires will “knit us into the fabric of the huge glittering costume, Earth.”

Drawing upon his own memories of growing up in Royston, Georgia, Kay follows Colin, his brother Wesley, and their friends through fierce battles fought on the school playground, an exhilarating visit to the Brady Dasher Flying Circus, desperate attempts to throw a search party off the trail in the Black Pool Swamp, and gleeful celebrations when all-important baseball games are won.

With an array of characters like Rev. Bartholomew R. Bytheway, a reformed fertilizer salesman who operates the Speaking-In-Tongues Traveling Tent Tabernacle, and Freeman Boyd, a Georgian Huck Finn who knows the swamp as well as the other boys know their backyards, Terry Kay’s book draws a marvelously nuanced portrait of the rural South poised on the brink of change following World War II.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terry Kay is the author of nine novels,
The
Year the Lights Came On
(1976),
After Eli
(1981),
Dark Thirty
(1984),
To
Vance with the White
Dog (1991),
Shadow
Song (1997), The
Runaway
(1998),
The
Kidnapping of Aaron Greene
(1999),
Taking Lottie Home
(2000), and
The Valley of Light
(2003). He is also the author of one collection of short essays,
Special Kay: The
Wisdom of Terry Kay,
and
To Whom the Angels Speak: A Story of the Christmas.
In 2004 he was awarded both the Best Fiction Award from the Georgia Writers Association and the Townsend Prize for
The
Valley of Light,
and in 2006 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Three of Kay’s novels—
To Dance
with the White Dog, The
Runaway,
and
The
Valley of Light
—have been presented as Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. Kay lives in Athens, Georgia.

DISCUSSION POINTS

1. The
   Year the Lights Came On
   has been used in some history classes as supplemental reading in the study of the post–World War II period. Why?
   

2. In the closing of the book, the author contends that the coming of electricity to rural farms changed the way people lived. What does he mean by this?
   

3. All stories have contrast in them—good and evil, for example. What element in
   The Year the Lights Came On
   represents this contrast?
   

4. In the relationship between Colin and Megan, what is the greatest dilemma for Colin?
   

5. What does Freeman Boyd’s character represent in the story?
   

6. Kay’s novel is framed with geographical boundaries separating the Our Side Gang from the Highway 17 Gang. There are also many invisible and intangible boundaries such as certain social codes that divide class, gender, and race. Discuss.
   

7. Black Pool Swamp is something other than a boundary. Describe its role in the novel and what it represents.
   

8. In the epilogue, the narrator says, “We are easily deceived. The REA changed our lives. The REA made us more comfortable. The REA also destroyed us.” What does the REA mean, both literally and in terms of the changes it brought to rural America?
   

9. Discuss what aspects of life were better or worse before electrification.
   

10. What technologies are changing our lives today? Discuss technologies you’d like to live without versus those you think enhance your life.