Word: faulknerisms
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With Hemingway and Faulkner dead, this is not a time of giants. The public is too easily preoccupied with giantism-an understandable result both of the publishers' belief that bestsellers sell best, and of the wistful ache of uncertain readers to be in the mode. But literature has never been a procession of giants. Nor do they arise, like occasional Poseidons, from a featureless sea. Rather, they form part of a moving and sustaining stream of literature, which is and must be fed by tributaries. Minor writers are needed to produce major ones...
Except for Rabbit, Run Updike has risked little. The risk of sloppy writing-one taken by most great novelists from Dostoevsky to Faulkner-is unthinkable to him; a page of prose, he feels, should be able to stand alone. "I would not attempt a big novel yet," he says. "My experience is too limited; I would be out of my depth." Such modesty is unexceptionable; yet it is hard to escape the feeling that out of his depth is exactly the place for a young novelist...
...astonishing spectrum of Southern novelists there is Faulkner. He loved the land's dark soil and, in a rueful way, its people. Toward the middle of the range is a large group of writers for whom the South is merely a neutral, abundant earth to be walked on and, where it is interesting, written about. At the spectrum's other extremity are a few novelists to whom the South itself is a vast, febrile malevolence. Among these, on the evidence of Eternal Fire, is Calder Willingham, 40, a Georgia expatriate who now lives in New Hampshire...
After several violent deaths, sundry fornications and an inventively rigged court trial, Author Willingham brings the book to its crowning mockery, a happy ending. The little flowers, pushing up through the mulch of Willingham's Faulkner parodies, Truman Capote parodies and Carson McCullers parodies, nod prettily to each other...
What makes the book memorable, however, is one whopping interior monologue. For more than 50 pages, interspersed Faulkner-style through the novel, Faehmel's mother records in a tone of well-bred perplexity a woman's 50-year struggle with an enemy she does not quite comprehend but which, she knows well enough, has destroyed her brothers, her two sons, her society. Time jumbles, blurs. In midsentence, she switches from memories of sending her brother off to the 1914 war to the thought that her other son must have been bewitched when he went off to join...