I’d “read” the book in high school I remembered the plot, but I could not in any way comment on it. So I picked up As I Lay Dying, the story of a poor rural family who labor to return their dead matriarch to her family’s home town for burial. The strategy worked, but of course I needed a follow up book. Go Down, Moses is strange and sad and funny and truly an achievement, a book that works as a sort of time machine, an attempt to undo or recover the racial and familial (in Faulkner, these are the same) divides of the past.Īfter reading Bolaño’s stunning 2666, I strategically read Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, knowing that I’d need a voice at least equal to Bolaño’s in order to not get totally bummed out and sort of paralyzed with that “What do I read next?” feeling. It wasn’t until last spring, when I read one of Faulkner’s last novels, Go Down, Moses, that I came to understand the genius of his writing, which is to say I came to learn to read his voices in a non-academic, non-studied fashion, intuitively and rhythmically. The truth, I realize now, is that while Faulkner’s strange, dense, elliptical prose might have passed under my eyes, I completely failed to read his books when I was a young man.
I was also laboring under a cruel miscalculation, the mistaken belief that I had actually read most of Faulkner’s great works– As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!–in my high school and undergraduate courses–where said books were assigned reading. At the time I wrote that rant, I was still in grad school, which is to say I was still being assigned reading by well-intentioned professors. It seems amazing to me that these two critics conned a whole generation into believing that someone whose books were so unbelievably poorly written was actually, like, a totally awesome and important writer.”
America needs a new master of literary fiction, and it might as well be Faulkner.
“…it seems that a few critics–notably Malcolm Cowley and Cleanth Brooks–decided either that a. In a review of his first published novel Sancutary, I argued, quite ineffectually, that, “Faulkner as an American Great is nothing but a scam.” Elsewhere, I proffered this ignorant nugget:
Not quite two years ago, I wrote some pretty awful things about William Faulkner on this blog.
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