Light in August.

Quick admin notes: Chat today at 1 pm (just for an hour). I’ll be on WHB in Kansas City with Rany Jazayerli at 7:30 CDT tonight. I’m trying to work out a hit time for our Chicago affiliate for tomorrow night as well.

On to more important matters…

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

William Faulkner is best known for a quartet of books that dot all of the greatest-books lists to which I look for reading suggestions; The Sound and the Fury is his most acclaimed, but Light in August isn’t far behind, appearing at #57 on the Modern Library 100, #65 on the Radcliffe Course’s 100, and on the (unranked) TIME 100, as well as on the honorable mentions (the “Second 100”) in the Novel 100. So, as a Faulkner fan, I’m disappointed to report that I didn’t love it the way I loved Sound, Absalom, Absalom!, or his final novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Reivers.

Light in August is a story of isolation and the oppression of history, set in Faulkner’s usual spot of Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi. Although the novel has several foci, the main charater for much of the book is Joe Christmas, a man of mysterious origins and unclear ancestry whose life has been marked by rejection and alienation. The book begins with the story of Lena, a young and naive woman, eight months pregnant, who walks and hitches her way from Alabama to Mississippi in search of the jackass who knocked her up and skipped town; when she arrives in the town of Jefferson, it is just after her paramour and Joe have been mixed up in a horrible crime, after which Faulkner jumps backward repeatedly in time to unfold Joe’s story in stages, from his brief time in an orphanage to his upbringing in a very strict household to, eventually, the circumstances of his birth. Joe himself suffers from a lack of identity because of his darker complexion and the possibility that he is part black, which in the south in the 1920s was (apparently) a major problem. Joe finds himself unaccepted by either the white or black communities and settles, by default, for a life of solitude until he meets a woman who is, if possible, more isolated than he is.

Christmas himself is about as clear a Christ figure as you’ll find in literature. (Thomas C. Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, in addition to just being a fun read, has a whole chapter on Christ figures and how to spot them.) Christmas’ initials match those of Christ, he appears at the orphanage on Christmas Day (hence the name), he is 33 years old at the time of his death, and his parentage is unclear and the subject of much rumor and speculation. He’s not Jesus, of course – he’s selfish and a survivalist and angry at everyone – but the allusions are there, and Christmas himself wonders (indirectly) about whether God has forsaken him.

Most of the book’s main characters are on the run from history. Christmas is running from an ethnicity and upbringing he didn’t choose, and it is as if his story was written for him once he was born and rejected by his mother’s family. Jefferson’s disgraced minister, Reverend Hightower, has been haunted since birth by visions of a grandfather who was killed in battle before the Reverend was born, almost as if he is that grandfather reincarnated, and his inability (or unwillingness) to carve out his own path instead of chasing ghosts from the Civil War doom his marriage, his ministry, and ultimately his happiness. Lena is the only character running toward something, but she’s running toward a man who doesn’t want her (or their baby) and ignoring forks in her road that could give her stability, if not actual happiness.

The prose example I used above is, to me, classic Faulkner, a circular style where the author bends language to his will and gives abstract concepts physical form. Sound and Absalom are difficult but rewarding reads because of this prose style, but August is largely written in a more traditional style that robs the book of some of the color and complexity of Faulkner’s other works. I also found Christmas – described by one critic whose name appears lost to the sands of time as “the loneliest character” in literature – unsympathetic despite all of the hardships he endures and the fact that he starts life in an 0-2 count; although he fights at the drop of a hat, there is no fight in him, only a cold survival instinct, which may be realistic for someone who comes from a childhood devoid of love or affection but doesn’t make for a great central character.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s First Among Sequels, book five (well, six, if you count The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco) in the Thursday Next series.