Light in August (1932)

Of the handful of great William Faulkner novels (and keeping in mind that even the second tier of his work is well above the top of all but a select few others), Light in August is probably the most pleasure to read, a big juicy pulp-fiction style of melodrama that swoops about among its elements like a bird of prey feeding on carrion—and thus, cautiously, I will suggest it as starting point if you have not yet read him. There are elements of this degree of storytelling power in The Sound and the Fury, but then there is also that novel's first hundred pages. As I Lay Dying is studied experiment. And both "The Bear" (probably more accurate to call a novella because so short, so make that Go Down, Moses) and Absalom, Absalom have long passages in which the language must be parsed slowly and patiently. By contrast, Light in August tends more toward simply introducing its themes and players and briskly setting them in motion, working everything with such facility and seeming ease into the kind of lurid gothic template into which he wanted so badly to fit Sanctuary (which, I will say, nonetheless remains very nearly one of his great ones too). To be sure, Light in August is not without the Faulkner trademarks of ornate brooding passages and elliptical structures, with long sentences and some tendency to favor the Latinate. The flashback, for example, to the troubled childhood of protagonist Joe Christmas (one of the great literary names) starts Chapter 6 with: "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears." But that kind of thing is generally more for the effect here, and doesn't constitute the bulk of it. Me, I find this language utterly hypnotic, particularly once fully under Faulkner's sway, but I certainly understand that YMMV. As a study in racist anxiety, a continuing underpinning theme all through Faulkner's work, of course, Light in August veers more toward the clinical (not to say Freudian) understandings of "hysterical"; but also toward the connotation of "very funny," in which regard it may sometimes seem almost badly dated. On the other hand, some days I look around at things happening all the time in Southern politics even now and I have to wonder how dated after all that the kind of grotesque, deep-seated racism documented here really is.

In case it's not at the library.