What I've been reading

I recently finished reading “Absalom, Absalom!” by Faulkner. I’ve read that article about how reading literary fiction makes you smarter, and I figure now I must be brilliant.

 I had actually read this book before, maybe 20 years ago, but I had a lot of trouble with it then: It wasn’t so much the long, convoluted sentences as the plot itself. The edition I just read includes both a chronology and a genealogy of the main characters, written by Faulkner and included in his first edition, which was either absent from the earlier text I read or else it was in the back and I didn’t notice it. Anyway, that made things much clearer, and I had no trouble following what was going on this time.

When I read it before, I approached Faulkner as you might approach a literary god. It’s possible his reputation was larger then, or it may have been an accident of geography: I was living in New Orleans, and Faulkner famously lived in New Orleans and wrote his first novel there, and of course his real literary territory was Mississippi, which is right next door.

I liked the book – liked it a lot, in fact – but I’m not quite sure it embodies divinity. Yes, the writing is incredible, and impressive. And the story is a hell of a yarn. But frankly, it seemed a bit over the top. I had always thought Faulkner transcended “Southern Gothic,” but boy, this was pretty freakin’ Gothic. And I anticipated the expression of the omniscient third-person narrator would be Faulkneresque, but so was that of virtually every character in the book, in speech and writing (like, in letters). That seemed a little weird. Also, the long sentences didn’t get to me, but the four-page paragraphs did. I’m an episodic reader – before going to bed, or at breakfast, for example – and when the paragraphs are that long, where do you stop? Picayune on my part, I know, but lordy.

It does include this wonderful concise description of New Orleans, as “that city foreign and paradoxical, with its atmosphere at once fatal and languorous, at once feminine and steel-hard…” I remembered that from my first reading; it was still true in 1996, and I bet still true today.

Finishing that book put me into that sweet, or maybe bittersweet, space where you have just done with the book that was your current read, so you are without a current read, and you contemplate what will be next. There is a sense of absence, a touch of anxiety, but also anticipation: Will it be history? Fiction? Something a bit different, like an anthology of essays? I typically alternate fiction and non-fiction, and I typically scour my bookshelves and savor the possibilities. I varied that slightly this time, in that I picked up on a suggestion from a co-worker and from the library acquired “Game Change,” a book about the 2008 presidential campaign. It is, as my coworker described it, political porn. It’s not great, but I am tearing through it and enjoying the heck out of it.