Light in August

Light in August
by William Faulkner
read: 2010
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #54

I've read four Faulkner books.  Two, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, featured lots of stream-of-consciousness writing and I didn't really enjoy them.  Two, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, were written in a more straightforward narrative style, and both blew me away.  Light in August is one of Faulkner's more accessible works, with story elements that could have been ripped from a soap opera: a love triangle, a forbidden affair, a mysterious stranger, and a manhunt for a murderer and arsonist.  But there is real depth and complexity here, as the novel deals with loneliness, race, identity, and honor.

There's a bunch of high-falutin' novel-as-craft stuff here.  Per Wikipedia:

Joe Christmas, whose name is obviously symbolic, showed up in front of the orphanage on Christmas Day, symbolic of Jesus' birth. Faulkner has 66 total characters in his book, and there are 66 books in the Bible. Christmas's death (at age 33) is described in terms of rising and serenity. The bullets from Percy Grimm's gun pierce the wooden table behind which Christmas crouches like nails through a cross. Lena and her fatherless child parallel Mary and Christ. Byron Bunch acts as the Joseph figure, acting as father for Lucas Burch/Joe Brown. Christian imagery can be found throughout.

I rarely care about that stuff.  I love the human moments here: Lena walking along the road at the beginning of the novel (and the way the end parallels this), Byron desperately confronting Lucas Burch out of a sense of honor and unconditional love, Joe Christmas never really understanding his own racial composition or how he fits into either the white or black world.  Faulkner is great at hitting on those core feelings of the human experience; even though none of those situations are familiar to me, the feelings they evoke are.  I guess that's what great writing, and all great art, is all about.