Part of an ongoing, infrequent series of reviews of William Faulkner books.
The Hamlet might be my current favorite Faulkner novel. The goings-on in Frenchmanās Bend, Mississippi are so vivid and engaging that even when we enter the ponderous murk of a characterās inner thoughts it still moves. Itās the first in a trilogy about how Flem Snopes, an enigmatic, shrewd, ambitious man who seems to lack morals or even a pulse comes to the hamlet and begins insinuating himself into the fabric of that society. It seems like it would be a hard place to crack because the men all gather in the general store or on the porch outside and have nothing but doubtful sardonic things to say. I think the novel appeals to me because I can hear those voices in my own family and my own area where I live which is very rural. The mannerisms seem so real to me. My grandfather was a dairy farmer who owned a general store and a feed store with his brother. Everybody knew each other and the knowledge of genealogy and relationships was deep and went back generations. This is very much in Faulknerās type of world, Yoknapatawpha County where he set his writing. I didnāt grow up in the South and I would never pretend to, but it seems like one part of rural America has a similarity with all the others in a way, and while Faulkner wrote about the South with its issues, he also was just writing about America.
The Snopes family starts moving in like an opportunistic fungus, seeking positions in the hamlet. Faulkner bears a resemblance to Balzac who wrote about a wide panorama of social life in 19th century France, including people striving for advantages. Money is behind it all, whether youāre in Balzacās France or Faulknerās Mississippi.
VK Ratliff serves as the viewpoint of the reader observing the progression of Snopesism into the countryside. Itās funny as fuck to listen to the dialogue of the men which I cannot replicate here, as they watch with amusement shading into consternation at the changes around them. Flem starts working at the general store and Snopeses start popping up in other jobs and roles from teacher to blacksmith. Itās like theyāre multiplying. I wonāt give away some surprises in the novel because I recommend others read it.
Some notorious aspects of the novel concern Ike Snopes, who is a mentally handicapped man child who forms a love attachment with a cow. Itās eerie and dreamlike and comical while still retaining that mythical quality that Faulkner has. It seemed to me like he was playing the reader by sinking him into long passages of otherworldly description with the cow, for twenty of thirty pages, only to set up an elaborate bestiality joke that sticks the landing so hard and funny. Itās grotesquerie but itās so well done.
Other funny parts involve the famous spotted horses auction where āhorse feverā takes over the townspeople as they bid on horses brought into town without any guarantees about what they are buying being willing to be owned. Women in the novel seem to know whatās up and have actual heads on their shoulders while the men are crazed idiots always thinking theyāre getting ahead on a risky deal. And yet no one can take Flem Snopes, not even the Prince of Darkness himself in another hilarious scene which shifts the novel into a new and surreal gear.
I find myself thinking in terms of gears with Faulkner, as if the novels are cars that switch from speed to speed according to a road. Sometimes the transitions are smooth, sometimes theyāre not. I just read Light in August which had some tough patches and it took effort to get up hills, but The Hamlet was much easier. I have a brand new copy of The Town which is book #2 in the Snopes trilogy. These were the novels Faulkner write near the end of his career. Iāve been thinking a bit about early vs late styles in writers. Not that Iāve read enough to tell much of anything about it. Iād like to read Faulknerās early novels to get a sense of how he progressed and taught himself about the art of writing novels before he made it to the big books like The Sound and The Fury or As I Lay Dying. There are other writers whose early books I prefer or havenāt moved much beyond yet. Iāve only read the first four books of Cormac McCarthy, which Iām learning didnāt really sell that well but his publishers kept taking chances on him ā which Dan Sinykin (spelling?) recently pointed out was a lucky feature of the time in publishing and McCarthyās career trajectory that could never be replicated now. It be only read the first four books of Thomas Pynchon, never made it past Vineland. Not because I think his later stuff is bad, Iām just so far not been drawn into it. Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, wrote some of his most interesting books in Russian while living in Europe. Much is made of Nabokovās āAmerican-ness,ā the way he was adopted by his new home and went on to radically calmly impact American letters. Nabokov hated Faulkner even though Faulkner was an actual true American writer par excellence that the Russian emigre could not comprehend (there is reason to believe Nabokov did not give the Mississippi modernist a chance beyond reading Sanctuary which was a sensationalistic potboiler). I feel like it is a sign of some sophistication that one could love both Nabokov and Faulkner and not get drawn into midcentury squabbles over who is the better writer. Theyāre just different. Nabokov may be the clearer stylist, but Faulkner feels like somebody I could be related to telling me stories about people I know.
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An excerpt from my novel Fear is a Hollow Verb is scheduled to come out on Saturday the 15th from Apocalypse Confidential. This is the spy novel Iāve been writing which is dead in the water as I havenāt added to it in a while. Maybe putting a fragment of it out there will spur me to keep working on it. This book, if it is to take the shape I envision, is the kind of thing that needs to be painstakingly researched so my fantasies involve me going away to a writerās retreat being given grant money to work on it and gave access to research libraries. Itās a fantasy of course. I need to research Russian espionage, Islam, Africa, the Bush administration, the history of the Internet circa 2006 before social media exploded everything. In fact Iām treating this like itās a historical novel because in many ways, 2006 is distant history ā so much has happened since then.
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