Absalom, Absalom! is not the great American novel. Or, if it is, it is a great American novel for someone who has time in the day to read for an hour or more at a time. Because that is the only way I was able comprehend this book - grab a glass of iced tea, hunker down and read. This is not to say the story of William Faulkner's book is uninteresting, because I find it quite intriguing. The events of the book surround the rise and fall of a Southern plantation owner Thomas Sutpen before, during and after the Civil War. There is love, murder, betrayal, all the things that can make a story excellent.However, Faulkner's writing style for me was extremely hard to get past. His sentences and paragraphs can ramble and weave on for pages with no end in sight and he changes speakers with no warning or indication. Suddenly an aunt becomes someone's sister and I was left wondering if I had been placing the wrong character with the pronouns. The first chapter where I felt I had a grasp on what was going on was chapter 5, wherein Quentin, a young man learning of his family's history, listens to Rosa detailing an assortment of tragedies that befell the Sutpen family after Thomas Sutpen's son Henry kills his sister Judith's fiancee. This fiancee, we learn, was the Elder Sutpen's bastard child and thus, Judith's half brother. But he was not killed for that; he was killed because Henry found out he had a mistress/wife in New Orleans. Confused yet? So was I.
Why did I select this novel? I knew Faulkner to be an author often employed on the "Great Novels of the 20th century/American literature/Southern writers" lists. I had not read anything by him save an excerpt here and there in college. I chose this particular novel because it was a slice of time in American history where one order, Southern slave holding plantation owners, was ending and another order, Northern industrialists, was beginning. To me, a great American novel has to include a piece about man against nature or a corporation - some sort of formidable foe that takes courage, gumption and will to topple. What better than a man who walks into town with nothing save wild slaves and makes an empire from a swampland? This had all the hopes, the pieces of the puzzle, but for me was done in with the writing style.
It is that very writing style, though, that I feel has most greatly influenced American literature and culture. Faulkner was considered by many one of the leaders of the modernist movement. This stream of consciousness writing he started in the early 1900s has now become an established way of expressing oneself. Rambling rock songs, slam poetry, indie and not-so-indie movies, the 60s - all boast some form of stream of consciousness use that began with Faulkner and his contemporaries. Perhaps Faulkner is like Shakespeare's writing in a way - hard to crack, but a wealth of rich history, mood and meaning once the reader breaks the barrier.
