Book Review 08-14-04
Absalom, Absalom

by William Faulkner, published 1936

I know that those who love Literature with a Capital L all say that the best books are always difficult; that they do not welcome you in all at once, but make you fight and struggle to understand them.

I am sympathetic to this idea, to a point. There are books that refuse to give up their secrets on a first reading, that only give you a bit more each time, until they have wormed their way into your mind. I have enjoyed books like that. But what makes this process bearable is that even in that first read, something hooks into you, something that you can use to pull yourself back. A sympathy between you and the author, similar to the kind of sympathy that begins a friendship.

You can still pursue that relationship with an author if the sympathy isn't there, keep battering against the book, forcing yourself to think in the paths the author has laid out because you think they are a genius, and that it will pay off for you. (This is almost the only way to read Ulysses.) I don't tend to be that kind of reader. Maybe it's laziness, or the feeling that life is too short to invest myself in one author so much.

I'm not sure if Absalom Absalom falls into the first category or the second. I approached it with trepidation, because I have always had an immunity against all things Old South. Gone With the Wind, hoop skirts, ugly columned plantation-style houses, the whole mess. None of it holds the least iota of romance for me, especially since it's inextricably twined with centuries of brutal exploitation. And Faulkner fans, the few I have read or met, seem seduced by that glamour, with the whole soap-operaish Dark Secrets genre, festooned as it is with Spanish moss and decrepit, insane old women gibbering in attics.

And the book gives you plenty of that, although it unfolds in a maddening, brilliant, backwards style of a narrator quoting another narrator, with endless asides, observations, and digressions. Not a book you could easily film.

Superficially, the book is the story of the ruthless Thomas Sutpen, who made his mark on the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi, a man whose means are of dubious origin but who buys respectability by marrying the daughter of the most respected man in town. Deep secrets are eventually revealed and the whole thing goes to hell, with incest, racial mixing, and lots of madness all around, in the grand Southern gothic style.

I say superficially, because I had to turn to the back of the book to read the helpful timeline which told me who was who and just what the hell was going on. Because nothing is told chronologically, family trees are murky, and overwrought digressions lurk everywhere, ready to pounce on the unwary reader. Normally this is the sort of thing that makes me throw a book across the room. I was tempted, believe me.

But Faulkner must have been a genius, because I didn't. I wasn't entirely seduced, but I was, against my own inclinations, intrigued. It haunted me. Something about the richness of the language, Faulkner's ability to create a feeling of incipient doom in every paragraph, the sheer weirdness of the tale, pulled me in. I may, some day when I have the time to devote to it, sit back down and puzzle my way through the maze again, letting it soak in. Like French cuisine, it seems to be the kind of thing best enjoyed slowly, appreciated, not for the nourishment it gives but for its ingeneuity.

William Faulkner website. (If you don't care about spoilers for Absalom, Absalom, a good summary is here).