by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 08, 2009   Last Updated: February 23, 2009

William Faulkner published four great novels in just three years. But where "The Sound and the Fury" focused on the troubled Compson family, "Light in August" follows outsiders and shows how they fared among the people of Yoknapatawpha County. The plot connects three stories, but a simple summary won't capture the book's magic.

Each character glows with a reality of emotion and dignity - because Faulkner had imagined the novel's world so completely.

"Light in August" opens with a comical touch - the story of a poor, orphaned young woman now relying on strangers to find the father of her baby. From the very first sentence, Faulkner charms the reader into his own world using dialect, hints of humility, and some very high personal stakes. ("Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, 'I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking.'") Faulkner scrambles through her life history, choosing moments that evoke sympathy, but with both humor and realism. When she was a little girl, she'd ask her father to let her walk into town instead of riding in their wagon - because she wanted people to think she was from the town. And when her parents die, and her brother picks her up in a wagon, "The wagon was borrowed and the brother had promised to return it by nightfall."

But Lena Grove isn't the only poor person struggling through the town. Joe Christmas works at the mill - though he's running moonshine. He has black ancestors, though it's not racists who make the most trouble for him. Instead, it's Joanna Burden, who's descended from abolitionists, and now, pushing for equal rights, wants Christmas to announce his own heritage. In Faulkner's world, grand ideals crash against the horrible indifference of the real world. When Chapter 2 opens, Joanna Burden's house is burning to the ground with her body still inside - nearly decapitated.

It's the ultimately irony that the murderer was named Christmas - since he'd struggled through his life to find any charity at all. A local minister mulls the fate that's been handed to Joe Christmas, and after the murder decides to try to help him. It's too late, of course, and the horrors in Faulkner's books often seem pre-ordained, despite the best intentions of his characters. And Faulkner switches to baffled townspeople, who watch Christmas's ending without understanding it, from the outside. They remember his grandmother visiting him in his jail cell.

It was shortly before he'd escaped, fleeing a lynch mob, and failed to find sanctuary at the minister's house.

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