Faulkner: A House Divided by Eric Sundquist

In this book Sundquist argues that the best way to understand Faulkner's literature is to see his good books (leaving the bad ones out of the equation) as being divided chronologically: in the first ones (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary) Faulkner develops a modernist form of his own, and in the later ones (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses) he finds themes (of race and racial conflict) appropriate for those forms. Sundquist does a nice job building connections between Faulkner's characters (I particularly liked the idea that although Quentin Compson commits suicide early on, Faulkner needs him too much to let him die), and connecting Faulkner's literature to both earlier nineteenth-century American prose (as Faulkner moves from Modernist to Americanist in Sundquist's estimation) and to the history Faulkner keeps digging up. The argument was fairly convincing and articulated very well.