As I Lay Dying - A Review

Yesterday with a post Super Bowl aching head I finished off the last thirty-five pages of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I hadn't read a Faulkner book since Light In August back in '94. I was hesitant because he is sooo thick and heavy at times. What I rediscivered in As I Lay Dying is how much humor he injects in his writing while still being heavy, nihilistic, and existential. What I did find to be difficult still is that Faulkner doesn't exactly hit the reader over the head with a new developement. He slips it in from the side or back door with a well placed phrase that the reader must catch.
As I Lay Dying is the story of a family trying to bury their dead mother. They ride around nine days with her in the back of the wagon in summer...in Mississppi...and its raining a lot of the time. Faulkner tells the story from the point of view of a series of different charcters: there's pretty Dewey Dell, queer Darl, angry Jewel, lazy Anse, stoic Cash, observant Peabody, etc etc. At first the story moves at a snails pace but then one gets the groove of Faulkner's rhytm and the narrative takes form. Issues covered in the novel are adultery, abortion, class, and...and stupid kids or something. Vardaman keeps thinking his mother is a fish...I never figured that one out. The book is full of classic Faulkner sentences, my favorite being, "Squatting, Dewey Dell's wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth."
As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's fifth novel. It was written in six weeks and published in 1930 while he was working at a power plant. I remember the quip he made to his supervisor when he worked at the post office and he ignored his customers because he was deeply involved in wiriting on the job. When confronted about his poor customer service he said, "I'm not at the beck and call of every two bit sonofabitch who wants to buy a postage stamp!"
Yesterday I went to the used bookstore to pick up The Sound And The Fury to continue my Faulkner phase but wound up with Lady Chatterley's Lover.

When Reading Is Difficult Aim Higher

I've had a hard time reading lately. My mind races a thousand miles an hour until I lay down in bed and open a book then my eyes lids become sandbags and sleep the curtain. Brought down with an unflattering flourish of drool.
I've read:
- about half of Henry Miller's The Air Conditioned Nightmare - boring, no real narrative
- reread Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - awesome...makes more sense every five years or so when I reread it
- the first looooong chapter of Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby - okay but between the recent biographies of Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Jackson I need a break from history
- maybe a chapter of Return To Wild America - an aging bird watcher talking about watching birds...an AARP ad
- 1/3 of Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse - a bit depressing and a bit too theater of the absurd for my liking
- The Norton critical guide to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land - a difficult poem and I hope to find the point of it all in the contemporary critical essays in this book.
But now, yesterday I settled on As I Lay Dying by Wm Faulkner. Excellent book. I'm 50 pages into and will finish it. Published in 1930, the book was written in six weeks while Faulkner worked at a power plant. This is the novel after his magnum opus, The Sound And The Fury. Faulkner is a writer one has to work up to. He is a challange, sort of like a sublime (or grotesque) John Steinbeck, but his characters are outstanding. This is the 3rd of his books I've read.