A Gathering of Old Men Essay & Criticism

A Gathering of Old Men Critical Overview

A Gathering of Old Men was received with unanimous praise by reviewers, who admired Gaines's ability to recreate once again, in his fifth novel, the texture of the lives of black and white people in rural Louisiana, especially the way the people actually spoke.

Reynolds Price, in The New York Times Book Review, drew attention to Gaines's "innovative method" of employing so many different first-person narrators, and the unexpected conclusion. He concluded that Gaines had constructed

with large and single-minded skills, a dignified and
calamitous and perhaps finally comic pageant to summarize
the history of an enormous, long waste in our
past—the mindless, mutual hatred of white and black,
which, he implies, may slowly be healing.

Ben Forkner, in America, pointed out that the poor conditions under which the blacks live is not entirely due to racism. An underlying...
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