The Hamlet by William Faulkner

The first part of the Snopes trilogy is really a hodge-podge. The Snopes infiltration is fairly constant of course, and they're always tricking, or making fools of everyone, even VK Ratliff. I just don't know what to do with so many incidents in the story: Mink killing Houston, Ike Snopes and the cow, and Eula Varner Snopes and her inexplicably attractive immobility. There's definitely class consciousness running through the novel (and race seems to drop away again). It's almost like 2 or 3 novellas strung together as one novel.