Finished: Light in August (Faulkner). A good book, but lots of tragic characters. Faulkner does tragic, honest characters as well as anyone. And by honest, I just mean truly human, flawed, and conflicted characters. I'm not sure I can put into words, but I feel very drawn to Faulkner's writing, even though it can be difficult to read...and it can wander off on tangents. It just seems very real to me, so I feel it in my bones. I guess that's the only way I can describe it. He says things like "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." Things like that I have to read a few times to understand, but I can feel them with certainty even if I can't explain them in words. Then...I start applying those words to some experience of my own and he's got me. He's made me think and appreciate and know that he understands human nature to the core. At least, he writes like he does. Anyway, Light in August didn't move me the way The Sound and the Fury did, because I was very taken with Quentin Compton in that book. I didn't really feel as strongly about any of the characters in Light in August, though I was compelled to know what would happen to them. And...even when the book was finished, I wanted to know what ended up happening with Lena and Byron.

Lena is a young, pregnant, unmarried 20 year old who has walked for weeks from Alabama into Mississippi searching for the father of her child, who was supposed to send for her after he found work. Needless to say, the father hightailed it out of there, changed his name and never intended to send for Lena. Lena makes it to "Jefferson", Mississippi where she meets Byron working at the mill where she had hoped to find the baby's father. Byron is instantly taken by her and her circumstances. He knows the father, who calls himself Joe Brown, and knows that he's bootlegging, very shady, and up to no good. Byron takes Lena to a boarding house and tries to shelter her from the news. Meanwhile, Joe Brown has partnered up with another man named Joe Christmas. Joe Christmas is a mysterious man who has lived on the outskirts of town for three years, having an affair with a never-married older woman, Joanna.

The book spends a great deal of time on the history of Joe Christmas and his is one of those characters that breaks your heart from the beginning. He definitely grows up to be a product of his unloving upbringing. Joe Christmas is left at an orphanage as a baby (on Christmas day) by his grandfather because his grandfather is certain that his daughter was impregnated by a black man as she "whorishly" slept around. His daughter dies in childbirth, which he figures she deserves, and he dumps the baby off. He keeps an eye on him from afar for awhile, but when he hears the other orphanage children calling him "nigger, nigger", he feels validated and leaves him for good. Joe Christmas looks like an average white boy, though, so even though he spends his life thinking he's got black blood in him, it's never known for sure. He's adopted by a super-religious couple and has a hellish upbringing. All his experiences with women are disastrous and he's haunted by the feelings that he doesn't fit in with white society or black society.

Back to current times...when Joanna goes a bit religiously fanatical on Joe Christmas, it is implied that he kills her, starts to burn her house down and runs away. However, Joe Brown is the one found in the house drunk, stumbling around, and not wanting a rescuer to go upstairs to find the body of Joanna. It is never determined which of the two actually kills Joanna, but the minute Joe Brown announces to the sheriff that Joe Christmas is part black, Joe Christmas becomes the hunted one. He's captured, tries to escape, and is killed in the process. In all...a truly sucky life for Joe Christmas.

Joe Brown finally discovers that Lena is in town and his baby has been born. He is dragged to see her by a deputy. He hems and haws around, then climbs out a back window and hops a train, leaving her again. Byron is witness to all this, and has several times asked Lena to marry him. She keeps saying no, that she needs to find Lucas (Joe Brown's real name), and Byron keeps going back for more. It is implied at the end of the book that they finally end up together. I hope that's so. :-)

Meanwhile, there is an entirely separate storyline about a disgraced preacher named Gail Hightower. I wasn't so moved by his story, though Faulkner spends alot of his imagery on this character. Reverend Hightower is friends with Byron, and actually delivers Lena's baby. We also hear quite a bit about his lonely childhood and harsh upbringing. Everyone has their flaws, and their demons, and I guess they aren't too much different from most every day people....except for Joe Christmas. Most people probably don't have it as bad as he did. :-(

Here are a couple of passages, among many, that moved me.

Byron tries to convince Reverend Hightower to vouch that Joe Christmas did not kill Joanna:

     "What is it you want me to do? Shall I go plead guilty to the murder? Is that it?"
     Byron's face cracks with that grimace faint, fleeting, sardonic, wary, without mirth. "It's next to that, I reckon." Then his face sobers; it is quite grave. "It's a poor thing to ask. God knows I know that." He watches his slow hand where it moves, preoccupied and trivial, upon the desk top. "I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that can't deny the bill when it comes around. They can't deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why don't anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good can't. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad. And it won't be like you haven't done it before, haven't already paid a bill like it once before. It oughtn't be so bad now as it was then."
     "Go on. Go on. What is it I am to do?"
     Byron watches his slow and ceaseless hand, musing. "He aint never admitted that he killed her. And all the evidence they got against him is Brown's word, which is next to none. You could say he was here with you that night. Every night when Brown said he watched him go up to the big house and go in it. Folks would believe you. They would believe that anyway. They would rather believe that about you than to believe that he lived with her like a husband and then killed her...."

When Byron has decided to leave town with Lena, he goes to the boarding house where he's lived for seven years to tell his landlady, but she's already packed his things up because she already knows he'll leave. This one made me smile:

     She was watching him. "You men," she said. "It aint a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You can't even know your own limits for devilment. Which aint more than I can measure on a pin, at that. I reckon if it wasn't for getting some woman mixed up in it to help you, you'd ever one of you be drug hollering into heaven before you was ten years old."

So, I think the next Faulkner I will tackle will be As I Lay Dying....but not for awhile. I'm going to let this one settle first.