Plasticity in nerve cell function Book

I read this in part as a response to what happened in Ferguson, the murder of that young black man still in his first youth. The poverty and nth-class status of blacks in the south at the time this novel is set--the 1940s, just before the advent of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement--was harsh and Faulkner captures it, and the murderous white vindictiveness, exquisitely. I like Faulkner. But if you have not yet read him, please don't start with Intruder. Read either The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Sanctuary, Collected Stories or The Hamlet first. Faulkner in his mid- to late career became very mannered in his style. He was a sad alcoholic by this time and the tipple did not help his writing. This novel is the weakest I've read, second only to the last Snopes volume, The Town. The critic Irving Howe has called the plot of Intruder "mechanical." I agree.

Now Intruder is nowhere near as bad as The Town, but it contains many self-indulgent passages where the author elects to be opaque for no good reason at all. Some choices of vocabulary are just maddening too. Not to mention the "not even" construction which must occur two or three times on every page. Having said that, let me add that there is some wonderful writing here. But you must wade through the self indulgence to get to it. Faulkner does these scenes in the buggy pitch darkness of the American south, bringing them to life like no one else I've read. In this novel most if not all of the action in and around the cemetery is beautifully rendered. Also, whenever he's traveling over landscape you are in excellent hands, but then you get to the point where he feels compelled to insert a "ten-dollar word," to use Hemingway's phrase. Hemingway said that you can't reread Faulkner, because when you do you see how he tricked you the first time through. I would limit that caveat mostly to the later work. The early work, from The Sound and the Fury onward, is outstanding and highly rereadable.

Recommended with reservations.