A failed dynasty in Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner is a challenging read. Faulkner is a wordsmith, and the book is as eloquent as it is long. It is not unheard of for sentences to streth most of a single page, and paragraphs continue for several pages. And you have to stay focused on this one; your mind can’t wander or you’ll find that you’ve read several pages and have no recollection of what they said, forcing you to go back and re-read. But for the patient reader, it is a tremendous novel well worth the trip.

This book is told in a non-linear fashion. Quentin is getting bits and pieces from different sources, and is also putting those pieces together in retelling the tale to his friend Shreve. The novel is mostly about the rise and fall of the Thomas Sutpen family legacy. He comes to an area of the south before the Civil War, basically with nothing but the shirt on his back, and grows it to a sprawling plantation with servants, slaves, and family to carry on his name. The Civil War comes along and puts a dent in that, as does some ghosts from Thomas’s past, of which we are unclear of until much later in the novel.

Thomas’s son Henry brings home a friend from college, Charles Bon, who falls for Henry’s sister Judith, to the point where a marriage is planned. However, Thomas doesn’t seem thrilled, and we learn much later that Charles is also Thomas’s son, from a previous failed marriage (the reason Thomas was penniless in the beginning). Whether Charles knows this or not, we never find out, but when Thomas tells Henry, Henry forswears his birthright and leaves. Later, when Charles returns to marry Judith, Henry ends up killing him and running off in exile.

Finally some backstory is told, where we learn of Thomas’s past and his motivations for trying to build a wealthy family legacy. Suffice it to say, he was a man of demons and carried his sins with him. In the end of the novel, all his family is killed in bizarre ways, and his large estate is shrivelled away to nothing, leaving only Jim Bond (Charles’s grandson from his own previous marriage) living on what is left of the estate, with everyone else from the doomed family dead.

Faulkner weaves words as well as anyone I’ve read. The writing is extremely details, almost too much so. I found myself reading passages in a slow drawl in my head, almost in a Morgan Freeman Shawshank-like dialogue. There isn’t much action to the book, and since all of the story is told by people in the book, even the action is told sort of matter-of-factly. You might think this would be boring, but it isn’t, but you do have to stay focused so as to not miss something. A solid novel and well deserving of praise.