BOOKS
SNOPES REVISITED
THE TOWN.
By
Williem Feulkner. Rendom House. $3.75.
The Town,
sequel to
The Hamlet
and the second part of
a long-projected trilogy about the Snopes family, is the most interesting
book William Faulkner has published
in
fifteen years. Though it falls
short of being a success it manages to transcend many of the moral
and rhetorical ineptitudes into which Faulkner's more recent work has
fallen. It is not, like
Intruder in the Dust,
a novel with a broken back,
half narrative, half Dixiecrat sociology. Its technical adventuresomeness
does not, as it did in
Requiem
for
a Nun,
obscure the novel's main
line of interest. Nor is its preoccupation with the largest moral issues
so ponderous, so abstract or so personal that
The Town
is continu–
ally being surrendered, as
A Fable
was, to that monologue of mus–
ing and ranting about universals which turns up whenever Faulkner's
dramatizing impulse wears thin.
The Town
revives the direct, dramatic
mode of
As I
Lay
Dying-the
story is presented through the conscious–
ness of several characters. It is remarkable for the extraordinary and
intelligent self-awareness it contains, and for the definitive moral and
social criticism it represents.
Beginning where
The Hamlet
leaves off,
The Town
covers approxi–
mately the next twenty years of the Snopes history, ending sometime
in 1927. Its scene is Jefferson, its subject the impact of Flem and his
family on Jefferson, and the reciprocal impact of Jefferson upon them.
In Jefferson, Flem, the closest thing in American literature to a per–
petual-motion machine of connivance and chicanery, parlays his in–
terests with the same secret and preternatural genius for making money
that enabled
him
to outman the "old pirate" of Frenchman's Bend,
Will Varner. He eliminates his partner in the ownership of a restaurant;
he invests in real estate; he becomes manager of the town power plant;
he continues to lend money usuriously to the tenant farmers on whom
"the entire cotton economy of the county was founded and supported,"
and becomes a power among them. Using his father-in-Iaw's influence
with impenetrable deviousness, he gets himself elected vice-president of
one of Jefferson's two banks, finally becomes its president, a deacon
