In which I critique the 'great American novel'

Uh huh.

I love to read. I've loved to read since I first learned how. My daddy passed his love of books and reading to me.

"Always gotcher nose in a damn book!" my mom would screech after repeatedly saying something to him. When he read, he was gone. He didn't see anything. He didn't hear anything. And, that fact was especially irritating to my yammering mother.

It's no wonder he lost himself in books...they were far more pleasant than his miserable reality. Though he would read almost anything...he even read the Koran once..his taste ran more to science fiction and westerns...quite a combo. Not exactly my cup of tea, but one's preference in reading material is...well...one's preference.

My taste in books is as wide and varied as my taste in food. I love biographies, true crime (I've always said that truth is stranger than fiction), just about anything by Stephen King or Dean Koontz, Truman Capote, John Grisham...mostly contemporary writers. I read for mostly entertainment purposes. I rarely read something that I'm supposed to learn something from.

I don't care much for poetry, especially the dark, brooding, self-exploring kind...I've got my own self-exploring to do, thank you very much. I do love the poetry of Dorothy Parker, though. She's just scathingly funny.
And I absolutely refuse to read anything resembling a 'bodice ripper' or anything remotely political. I DO have my standards, ya know?

I've tried to read 'War and Peace' on more than one occasion...just because I thought I should. (yawn) I tried to read 'Atlas Shrugged' for the same reason...and got the same result. I've read my share of 'classics'. Most are 'classic' for a reason. Some..well...I've never understood just why they're considered 'classic'.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Kinda.

At this stage in my life, I've decided that I should read a few more 'great American novels'...just...because. The classics I haven't read yet. Perusing ye old Amazon site, I added a few to my Christmas wish list. Faulkner. Hemingway. Williams. Fitzgerald. Kerouac. Wolf.

So I was delighted when Ziggy got me a collection of Faulkner novels for Christmas...(he loooves that Amazon Wish List...takes all the guesswork out of Christmas shopping)...As I Lay Dying, Light in August and The Sound and the Fury.

Gawd holy damn. I must be far denser than I thought.

I picked 'As I Lay Dying' for my first foray into Faulkner. It's a sad, depressing tale of a mother and wife who dies. It chronicles her family's (Jewel, Darl, Dewey Dell, Vardaman and papa Anse) pitiful attempts to fulfill her request to be buried far from where they live. (I can see why)

Keep in mind, this novel is set in the mid-1920's or so in the deep south. In the summer. Nope. No cars...horse and buggy. No air conditioning. No embalming. And the burial location, while Faulkner doesn't elaborate on distance, is days away.

To make it worse, each chapter is told by a different family member...and it's written in the vernacular. Sometimes words are capitalized and sometimes they aren't. And the punctuation is...scattered.

"The trees look like chickens when they ruffle out into the cool dust on the hot days. If I jump off the porch I will be where the fish was, and it all cut up into not-fish now. I can hear the bed and her face and them and I can feel the floor shake when he walks on it that came and did it."

Here's the spoiler: the useless, bumbling father uses the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. He gets the by-now-long-dead-and-stinking-to-high-heaven wife buried in the 'big city' and gets him a new one in the same day. It's no wonder that hillbillies get such a bad rap.

Nobody told me it was supposed to be a black comedy.

Ok, so I slogged through that one. I am determined to read the other two...if it kills me.

The second choice was 'Light in August'. It's a bit...easier, though kind of confusing. It's really two stories..that of a very pregnant and barefoot, unmarried hick-ette who sets out on foot to search for the slimy, fast-talking papa-to-be and a mulatto bootlegger/murderer (no, he's not the papa-to-be) and how their paths cross. Sorta.

It left me with a kind of a...ho-hum...feeling.

Ok, so the back cover of 'The Sound and the Fury' says it's "the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant."

I'm in the process of trying to wallow through it.

Again, it's written in the vernacular, with punctuation and capitalization seemingly an afterthought.

"Father will be dead in a year they say if he doesn't stop drinking and he wont stop he cant stop since I since last summer and then they'll send Benjy to Jackson I cant cry I cant even cry one minute she was standing in the door the next minute he was pulling at her dress and bellowing his voice hammered back and forth between the walls in waves and she shrinking against the wall..."

And this is supposed to be "one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century."

Of course I see glimmers of beauty in some of the phrases. I'd be a doofus NOT to. But a few little glimmers do not make a great novel. At least in my humble opinion, they don't.

Then again, nobody asked for my opinion, did they?

I'm thinkin that my little foray into the 'great American novel' just might result in me rethinkin the whole 'bodice ripper' thing.