Faulkner

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 13, 1999 | by Woody West

Classic Comebacks

One does not read a great book, Vladimir Nabokov contended; one re-reads it. The sentiment applies to great writers as well, especially to William Faulkner. It would be as hard to conceive of 20th-century American literature without him as 19th-century literature without Herman Melville.

The admirable Library of America has published its third volume of Faulkner's novels, this one collecting the books he wrote between 1957 and 1962, the year he died. Included are the two final books in the Yoknapatawpha County or Snopes trilogy: The Town and The Mansion. (The first, The Hamlet, was published in 1940.) Joseph Blotner, Faulkner's principal biographer, compiled a chronology and contributes explanatory notes; Noel Polk edited the texts.

The Hamlet was written as Faulkner was at artistic cruising speed and its theme, as in the body of Faulkner's writing, is "the doomed and damned fragility of human conditions." But critics have not held the two final Snopes volumes in as high esteem. There is, however, a coherence in the trilogy that enlarges the imaginative universe that Faulkner created in chronicling the slow extirpation of the traditional South. The Town and The Mansion also contain some of Faulkner's most robust humor -- humor in the sharpest reach of the comedic that penetrates with absurd hilarity to the core of being human.

The third novel in the volume, The Reivers, was the final book of a physically and emotionally wasted writer. But it has a clear virtue: For those disconcerted by having heard how dense and syntactically complicated Faulkner's writing, the novel is a less layered introduction to a superb storyteller.