bedtime reading these days

I’m back on Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! It’s usually rated very highly among his works, but I find it to be one of the weakest of his novels that I’ve read.

Problem number 1: he’s trying too hard to be the Southern version of Joseph Conrad. If you’ve reread Heart of Darkness reasonably recently before this novel (as I have) it can make you cringe now and then. And the funny thing is, Absalom, Absalom! is by no means one of Faulkner’s early works, so the Conrad influence (which is widely recognized) ought to have been fully digested and transformed by this point in his career.

Problem number 2: the structure of the work is unconvincing. It’s a let’s-get-to-the-bottom-of-this-old-local-mystery sort of thing, but the conversations in which the characters collaborate to solve the mystery often feel forced, especially the ones between Quentin and his father and Quentin and Shreve.

Problem 3: we know from elsewhere in Faulkner that Quentin will soon commit suicide at Harvard. But while I’m not done with the current novel yet, there’s little sense of that from the Quentin presented in the current novel (despite his famous closing defensive lines about the South, which I skipped ahead to read). This leads the novels to weaken each other slightly rather than providing mutual reinforcement.

Problem 4: it’s one thing for an author to slip into using a heavy dose of polysyllabic words, but quite another to put those words in the mouth of a character where they don’t fit. In this respect the dialogue of Rosa Coldfield feels completely unconvincing to me.

I think Faulkner is generally at his best when he’s even more experimental than this. The Sound and the Fury is such a masterpiece that it would be one of the five greatest novels of all time if it had a more epic scope. In my opinion he’s also better when he’s unconsciously Southern (to whatever extent possible) rather than forcedly self-consciously Southern.