Light in August

I read this because it's one of my dad's old books. He calls it his favorite, and is a Faulkner fan in general, but I gotta admit that I wouldn't have finished this if it wasn't for that connection.

There are passages of this book that are great. Long sequences of evocative imagery, especially with Christmas and the "street" of crime he follows from 17 to 33 and his various wanderings leading to Jefferson or his flight after the house burns down where he drifts for days unable to keep track of time.

Faulkner has a definite style of his own, the story reads like it's being told to you, with a lot of vernacular and contextual repetition of words and in that way it feels personal. Considering it was set in Faulkner's modern day and place, that makes sense - it's literally him telling you this story as if you were just sitting and listening.

Generally I love authors with a point of view. That said, Faulkner's style basically goes against everything that I value in prose. His sentences are long and winding and hard to parse. The story jumps back and forth in time, sometimes in order to fill in backstory, but sometimes it just feels like he was jumping ahead to touch on one character before the others and then later he fills in the gap. This does work some of the time (for example, knowing that Brown flees the cabin before you read the scene where he's in the cabin colors all of the lies he tells to Lena) but other times it's just confusing (like when we find out Christmas is shot to death before we read the passage about his "escape", even though we already knew he died). There are also more one-off characters than I care to remember (like how the final chapter is told as a first person recounting of a new character introduced for no real reason). Again, all of this mirrors the sort of long, winding oral history vibe that Faulkner was presenting, but just because that's the case doesn't make it any easier to read.

Anyway, it was these bipolar stretches of greatness connected with almost tediously windy prose that turned this book into more of a chore than I usually tolerate. By the time I was on the last 100 pages I was just reading to finish the book more than any enjoyment or interest in the story and, even if I can intellectually see where Faulkner was going and recognize that there are probably themes and symbols I'm failing to examine, in my mind that gut check is pretty damning.

From the middle of the novel - really the heart of the story. The day Joe Christmas became a man:

He stepped from the dark porch, into the moonlight, and with his bloody head and his empty stomach hot, savage, and courageous with whiskey, he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.

The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask.

It doens't get better than that. This one of the best books I've read.

The structure of the novel is like a wheel, wheels and roads are two of the primary symbols throughout.

The outside wheel is Leena Grove - an unwed mother who is looking for the father. The father ran off. She's tracking him down -

She's walked from Alabama to Missiissipi "a fur piece". She takes a ride into Jefferson, stopping along a road looking at the wagon. Same imagery as Joe Christmas who is at the center of the novel. The hub.

The spokes is a former preacher named Hightower, who was also drawn to Jefferson. But by his own boyhood folly and romanticism over his confederate grandfather's death in the War.

This novel is about isolation and community. About trust (Lena) and distrust (Christmas).
Christmas is a dark Christ figure. Faulkner has to be very direct on the comparsions because Christmas is not a good person. His name and age 33 and his time in Jefferson - 3 years are the key links to the Christ figure status.

Great read.