The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

I first read the Sound and the Fury when I was nineteen and I was not ready. Consequently, I remembered almost nothing about it and understood even less. Revisiting it two decades later, I can say this time I remember a lot more and understand at least some of it, so that’s progress.

The story, if you can call it that, concerns the Compsons, a once-prosperous white Mississippi family that has been brought low by time and circumstance. Each of its four parts ostensibly takes place over a single day (Parts 1, 3, and 4 over Easter weekend in 1928, Part 2 in June of 1910), though the recollections and musings of the different narrators send them sprawling over a much wider range of time.

The first section is told by Benjy Compson, who is mentally disabled and speaks with a limited vocabulary. One would think this would simplify the prose, but Benjy’s section is if anything the hardest to follow. He has little to no grasp on what he sees, which means the reader has to infer events from puzzled descriptions, and he frequently confuses the past with the present.

The second part takes us back in time to Quentin Compson, and intelligent but disturbed figure who spends the day planning his suicide. Faulkner leverages a lot of stream of consciousness passages to portray his frazzled state, though Quentin at least understands his circumstances and describes things in a somewhat comprehensive manner.

Back in 1928, Jason Compson narrates the third part. Jason is a crude and unpleasant man who begrudges his family for their reliance on him. His plainspoken prose is the clearest in the book, though he too is an unreliable narrator in a sense, as his hard-done-by posturing and self-absorption cause him to paint his actions in an unrealistically flattering light.

The fourth section steps back from the characters altogether, relying instead on an impartial omniscient narrator. Here we finally get what seems like an honest picture of the characters.

There are some plot elements, but they are buried under Faulkner’s style and don’t seem terribly important. The book feels more like it is to be experienced than understood. Faulkner wrote it at a time where he thought he’d never be published again, and so threw himself headlong into obscurity almost out of spite. The result isn’t a joy to read, but Faulkner’s skill is tough to deny.

Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe

“…a stone, a leaf, an unfound door…”

So begins the prologue of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, five free-flowing paragraphs of image-clotted prose, without a single plot point or character in sight, and instantly my mind turns to the Dark Tower. Readers of King’s epic will recognize the line—even with the original leaf in place of the rose—alongside the lamenting cry of “o lost” that sounds throughout the story.

At first I wondered why King chose this book to mirror in his series. On the face of it, it doesn’t have much in common with his macabre fusion of oat opera and high fantasy. Far from a genre piece, Look Homeward, Angel is unapologetically “literary” in style and content, a long-limbed Bildungsroman that shuffles sideways through its thin narrative, favoring florid digressions and subtle characters studies over anything as coarse and tangible as a plot.

And yet, as I read the book and sank deeper into its style, I started to see the peculiar ways in which it and the Dark Tower are alike. For Look Homeward, Angel is really a story about grief: grief for loved ones who die, in part, but mostly grief for the past, and for a childhood spent and squandered and inevitably lost. Likewise, the Dark Tower, underneath its industrious world-building and horror fantasy trappings, is a lament for a world that has moved on. And while Roland’s relentless quest for the Tower is driven by a need to restore order, there is a sense of futility that underpins the journey—a point driven home by its divisive ending.

It’s easy to accuse books like Look Homeward, Angel of being all style and no substance, exercises in pretension that wallow in their opacity, verbiage for verbiage’s sake. I’ve read books like that, and I’m not a fan. But there’s more here than simply stylish prose—though Wolfe is without peer at composing sentences of symphonic richness.

The characters are keenly felt, and their flaws and interactions are painted with a storyteller’s eye for detail. Though set over a century ago, much of it feels surprisingly contemporary, if not in its setting or technology, then at least in the problems that emerge in a single house shared by too many people, and the oscillating love and fury that families often excite in one another.

I read Look Homeward, Angel at a comparatively relaxed pace, putting it down partway through to read other books in the interim. I think this helped me more fully appreciate it, as it gave me time to approach it on its own terms. I enjoyed it more the more I read, and though it seemed daunting in its first hundred pages, by the end I found myself feeling sad that it was over—fitting, I suppose, for a book about grieving the past.

O discordia, o lost.