I figure if I am going to 3-star a Pulitzer Prize winning Faulkner novel I’ve got some ‘splainin to do.

I have a checkered history with picaresque novels. I could not finish Don Quixote but The Adventures of Augie Marsh is one of my favorite books. I loved The Goldfinch but Kim almost turned me off reading forever. It’s a tricky balancing act creating over-the-top stories that are not irritating and that line is in a different place for every reader. Perhaps the best-known American master of the picaresque novel is Mark Twain, and from the moment this book started Twain was all I could think of. If I had read this book without attribution and was asked to guess the author I would not have thought twice before naming Mr. Clemens. I have a bit of a love-hate thing going with Twain as well. I love Huck Finn, and have read it half a dozen times, including two reads with my child. I neither love nor hate Tom Sawyer (which I had 4-starred here on GR, but that is inaccurate) and I despised Pudd’nhead Wilson. Pudd’nhead is the first book I can recall hurling against the wall when it was assigned in my 1st year lit class. This book had elements of all three of those books, and in the end my heart tells me this is a weak 3-star. I would be remiss if I did not mention another book it held a VERY strong resemblance to – Amor Towles The Lincoln Highway was the Northeastern version of this Mississippi tale. My friends who did not like that book, (I actually did, though I did not adore it) you ought to steer clear of this one.

The very basic outline of the story is strong. Our band of merry reivers includes a buffoon (Boon), a resourceful black man (Ned, who was part of the same family as the white characters but this is Mississippi in the early 20th so black and white people being part of the same family meant something different from what it would now), and 11 year old Lucious Priest, (which is a fine name!) who was left in their care while his parents attend a funeral. The reivers steal a car, sell it for a horse, hang out in a brothel where they make friends aplenty, somehow get the horse to another town where they race the horse using questionable tactics, and get the car back. This is Faulkner’s last book (the Pulitzer was awarded posthumously) and it mostly reads like the ramblings of an old man. Faulkner was only 63 when he finished this book but he sounds like celebrated old crank Andy Rooney. Here we have Faulkner recalling a moment when the world began to change from horses to cars and trains. He is telling that story of change 40 years later as the country lives through another seismic shift. This is written immediately in the wake of the decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and at a time when Kennedy was in the White House. Faulkner would have heard that MLK was championing the Second Emancipation Proclamation and would have watched peaceful marchers attacked by police in segregated Albany GA (we say Al-Binny down south btw.) Perhaps most impactful, he likely watched out his office window when riots erupted on the campus of Ole’ Miss when snarling white folks fought to block James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, from attending classes.

I think Faulkner was a relatively good man (well, he prodigiously and publicly cheated on his wife, but I don’t judge) who knew he was wrong in opposing desegregation. I believe he publicly said something along the lines of it being a good idea that should not be forced. I expect as he was watching the racist melee out of his office window at Ole Miss he had some feelings to work through. He saw the parallel, the fear of change that to him was reminiscent of the resistance to the necessary changes wrought by the industrial/automotive age he saw as a boy. I suspect for all his “go slow” public statements about desegregation he knew that without force we would never see desegregation. I think I see what he was doing here, and it is intended to be a noble thing. But the book still didn’t work for me. The fact that this, his last novel, showed nostalgia for travel by horse is ironic in light of the fact that his death immediately after finishing the book was caused by injuries sustained after a fall from a horse. Resist change at your peril.

A couple notes: I am a Faulkner fan. I really love his books I have read from the 20s and 30’s but I don't connect with Yoknapatawpha County and I don't think his stabs at the comic novel worked. I was not crazy about this, and I stopped reading Wild Palms after perhaps 25 pages because it didn’t work for me. Also, the N-word is tossed around casually and frequently here, and the black characters are portrayed in stereotypical ways for the most part - they really know how to party and are content to live lives in the shadow of the white folks who have so much less fun than they do. Women fare no better, though he acknowledges that most all of the women's lives are made worse by men. Mostly the women we spend time with are hookers with hearts of gold and deep desires to do men’s laundry and have sex with other men to get their chosen men out of trouble. No question it is offensive, at least to me. That said, I imagine it reflects his memory of how white people thought and talked in the early 20th in Mississippi, and I expect it was not a wholly inaccurate recollection. Faulkner certainly had more information to work with than I when he made these choices.

Okay, I will shut up now. Hopefully, this is enough to let you know if you should read this one.

This was the first book by William Faulkner that I really liked. I remember reading As I Lay Dying and dragging through the story. This one however made me chuckle multiple times and painted a vivid picture of the expanding west- right at the advent of motor vehicles. At times Faulkner's story stalled a little with all the "he said, she said" dialogue- but for the most part the voice was enjoyable and easy to read.

Faulkner won a Pulitzer fifty years ago with this story about thieves - reivers - that very much reminded me of Huck Finn and his accomplices. Boon, Lucius, and Ned "borrow" a car and head to Memphis for a weekend of horse races and high-livin'. It's one of Faulkner's more accessible novels.

Faulkner is too indirect for me. meh.

" ... nightmare vision of our nation's vast and boundless future in which the basic unit of its economy and prosperity would be a small mass-produced cubicle containing four wheels and an engine."

"No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the un-virtue of any given moment, any more than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it ... Probably it cannot: who to the dedicated to Virtue, offer in reward only cold and odorless and tasteless virtue: as compared not only to the bright rewards of sin and pleasure but to the ever watchful unflagging omniprescient skill -- that incredible matchless capacity for invention and imagination -- with which even the tottering footsteps of infancy are steadily and firmly guided into the primrose path."

"I said, and I believed it (I know I believed it because I have said it a thousand times since and I still believe it and I hope to say it a thousand times more in my life and I defy anyone to say I will not believe it) I will never lie again."

"And more: that he wanted me to do that, was silently begging me to do that; he and I both aghast not at his individual temerity but at our mutual, our confederated recklessness, and that Boon knew he had not the strength to resist his and so much cast himself on my strength and rectitude."

"Because you should be prepared for experience, knowledge, knowing: not bludgeoned unaware in the dark as by a highwayman or footpad. I was just eleven, remember. There are things, circumstances, conditions in the world which should not be there but are, and you cant escape them and indeed, you would not escape them even if you had the choice, since they too are a part of Motion, of participating in life, being alive. But they should arrive with grace, decency."

"So maybe there are after all other things besides just Poverty and Non-virtue who look after their own."

" ... hating all of us for being the poor frail victims of being alive, having to be alive ... "

" ... there are no seasons at all any more, with interiors artificially contrived at sixty degrees in summer and ninety degrees in winter, so that mossbacked recidivists like me must go outside in summer to escape the cold and in winter to escape the heat; including the automobiles also which once were mere economic necessities but are now social ones, the moment already here when, if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state; I wont see it but you may: a law compelled and enforced by dire and frantic social -- not economic: social -- desperation permitting a woman but one child as she is now permitted but one husband.)"

" 'Don't lie to me,' Grandfather said. 'Horses dont eat sardines.' "

" ... nightmare vision of our nation's vast and boundless future in which the basic unit of its economy and prosperity would be a small mass-produced cubicle containing four wheels and an engine."

"No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the un-virtue of any given moment, any more than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it ... Probably it cannot: who to the dedicated to Virtue, offer in reward only cold and odorless and tasteless virtue: as compared not only to the bright rewards of sin and pleasure but to the ever watchful unflagging omniprescient skill -- that incredible matchless capacity for invention and imagination -- with which even the tottering footsteps of infancy are steadily and firmly guided into the primrose path."

"I said, and I believed it (I know I believed it because I have said it a thousand times since and I still believe it and I hope to say it a thousand times more in my life and I defy anyone to say I will not believe it) I will never lie again."

"And more: that he wanted me to do that, was silently begging me to do that; he and I both aghast not at his individual temerity but at our mutual, our confederated recklessness, and that Boon knew he had not the strength to resist his and so much cast himself on my strength and rectitude."

"Because you should be prepared for experience, knowledge, knowing: not bludgeoned unaware in the dark as by a highwayman or footpad. I was just eleven, remember. There are things, circumstances, conditions in the world which should not be there but are, and you cant escape them and indeed, you would not escape them even if you had the choice, since they too are a part of Motion, of participating in life, being alive. But they should arrive with grace, decency."

"So maybe there are after all other things besides just Poverty and Non-virtue who look after their own."

" ... hating all of us for being the poor frail victims of being alive, having to be alive ... "

" ... there are no seasons at all any more, with interiors artificially contrived at sixty degrees in summer and ninety degrees in winter, so that mossbacked recidivists like me must go outside in summer to escape the cold and in winter to escape the heat; including the automobiles also which once were mere economic necessities but are now social ones, the moment already here when, if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state; I wont see it but you may: a law compelled and enforced by dire and frantic social -- not economic: social -- desperation permitting a woman but one child as she is now permitted but one husband.)"

" 'Don't lie to me,' Grandfather said. 'Horses dont eat sardines.' "

This was an entertaining read -- and it had some really comedic moments. I really waffled between 3 and 4 stars, but I think it was well-written, and a decent jumping off point for my first real engagement with Faulkner. I will read some more of his works, even if this one didn't blow me away.

Faulkner's last book, but this would be a good first Faulkner for a lot of people. It's got a good pace to it and keeps rolling. Like with everything else of his I've read I'm not sure what he meant to tell me, but that's a-ok with me.