William Faulkner is not an author whose books one tends to reread. When you’ve mounted the Everests of Absalom, Absalom! or The Hamlet, for example, you may feel exhilarated and triumphant, but you don’t particularly yearn to start all over from the beginning. I’ve read Light in August twice and will again. Of all Faulkner’s novels, it is the most atmospheric in its depiction of the hot summer deep South and the most tragic and compelling in the trajectory it plots for its main characters.
Race is never far from the surface in Faulkner’s books and it is front and center here. Joe Christmas, who has often passed for white when he meets the sexually frustrated and menopausal Joanna Burden, is possibly the richest black character in all of Faulkner. The innocent but pregnant Lena Grove is Eve in a fallen world, and the Reverend Hightower, as Christmas’s conflicted protector and Lena’s deliverer, unites the novel’s various themes of racial intolerance, isolation born of conscience, and the search for or avoidance of one’s true identity. Christian themes and parallels abound, but the book is never schematic or preachy. And the ending is one of the most memorable in all of 20th century fiction.
Light in August is also one of the most readable of Faulkner’s novels. Certainly the clotted and hyper-descriptive, and repetitive, prose of Absalom, Absalom!, or the dense and challenging stream-of-consciousness in The Sound and the Fury (I confess to having read only the first section, though I’ve tried the second at least twice and gave up both times!) have their considerable rewards, however much patient rereading is required, but “Light in August” is written in a lovely distillation of Faulknerian prose. I’ll leave you with this passage, one of my favorites, describing the pregnant Lena watching the slow progress of a wagon coming her way. It’s about the most overwrought you’ll find in the book:
The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and ungreased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry sluggish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewinery silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much is this so that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ‘That far within my hearing before my seeing,’ Lena thinks.
Other highly recommended works of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, “A Rose for Emily” (short story), The Bear, and Go Down, Moses.
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