. Spinning .

As the plan goes into action to race the horse, the narrator sleeps up in the attic with Otis, another young boy at the house who is very different than Lucius. When Otis reveals that he has made money by drilling peepholes into the rooms and charged others to spy on what was going on with Miss Corrie and her customers, Lucius feels rage and disgust and attacks him. Otis, however, has a knife and while he takes a bad beating, Lucius grabs the knife away and is badly cut.  Miss Corrie comes up to dress the wound and Otis has told her what the fight was about. She is obviously moved by Lucius' actions.

Corrie's promise not to prostitute herself is made because she has seen someone else defend her virtue. Lucius is a product of his upbringing and while he doesn't know exactly what's going on here, he knows that Otis' actions played on the evil side of man's nature, and in the process, further degraded Miss Corrie's own. He is learning fast:

Lucius has resolved to his understanding that his taking the car with Boon and taking off was a struggle that Non-virtue seemed to make all too easy, his lies were corroborated just by circumstance and helped pave his path to the forbidden. With this encounter, he has seen that things happen just as easily when one does the right thing. Just as Miss Corrie has learned that good does exist, so has Lucius and they have formed a bond in their acceptance.

Okay, I made that up, but it seems that this is what Faulkner is doing as he builds the character base and the importance of the automobile to plot.

It brings to mind making tapioca, or more particularly, jelly or candy where you must stir constantly while heating though nothing much appears to be going on. All at once, a certain temperature is reached and the boiling cannot be controlled by stirring and the mixture must be taken off the heat before it overflows the pot.

Faulkner has given us enough time spent with the two main characters, Boon Hoggenbeck and Lucius Priest, and has them past their first hurtle of taking off with the automobile on a secret joyride that will last supposedly for a day or two until they must return the car. Here, with the addition of the stowaway Ned, and the interest of Miss Reba's house of ill repute, we have more interaction that moves the story a bit more quickly.

And just as the story is starting to form those tiny bubbles at the edge of the pot, Faulkner threatens to boil: Ned has traded the auto for a racehorse.

Interesting, as Faulkner gives voice via his narrator into a manner of labeling generically the political positions of his own time by describing the whorehouse's master (or pimp):

Picking up some speed here with the reading; hate to say it, but the first 80 pages were duller than matte paint.

Boon has been warning Lucius and Ned about this particular spot and how hard it would be to get the car across this mudhole portion of road. What the other two were not made aware of is that there is a gent who is not only prepared sitting by with mules and tackles to get the passersby through the mud for a fee, he is also responsible for producing and maintaining the obstacle.

I like Faulkner's facing up to the clash of past and present, old and new. There is an element of change and there is something that never changes: the folks who will always be there to take advantage of opportunity for self gain.

One of the first things I noticed about Cormac McCarthy's writing style was a propensity to double up on words and phrases that emphasized the meaning. For example, something like "the sun was hot, was hot, and was hot," which isn't from anything McCarthy, just a quickie as an example. Another writer (why can't I recall?) did this as well. It sets the fact in the reader's mind exactly how hot the sun felt.

But with Faulkner, I'm seeing a duplication of meaning using a different word that is set to emphasize perhaps, but to my editing mind, comes off like an editing change of which word is better, choose one, drop the other.

While reaching and approaching are not exactly alike in meaning, one being successful where the other is nearly so, their use here would seem to make the difference negligible. Whereas the two words may even be in conflict with each other, one could say that it would be a clarifying term, had approaching come before reaching. This would indicate a moment's movement that could make the difference.

Movement again is the subject of the next pair of verbs–and Faulkner does this most often with verbs–and while lurched and canted indicate two different motions, I can't help but think that either one singley used would have sufficed.

What is the mood behind Faulkner's choice of diction? Could it be that we have an old man telling a tale and this speech pattern becomes more intimate with its voice of reality? For me, however, always and ever in editing mode, I see it as a returned-from-workshopping eagerness to change the words of the writer.

Slow. Ploddingly so. I am missing something here, I'm sure, but I'm about to miss more as I plan to scan-read through some of this to find something that holds me to Faulkner's story.

Yes, I am ashamed of myself; I'm obviously missing the magic somehow. There are several instances where Faulkner repeats his statement using different words lengthening an already somnambulant story. The plot points have been the planning of this trip and the manipulations on the part of both Boon and Lucius to get away from the family and take off in the automobile. Ned is a stowaway and Faulkner introduces his presences with a bit of humor as Ned's flatulence gives him away.

So I'll be skipping some passages, thoroughly ashamed of my illiterate ways.

Faulkner has taken a heck of a lot of time to give us an environment with a couple of characters and an adventure about to begin. At this point, those who like action and fast paced reading might have continued reading to find some satisfaction in the story. I must admit though that even I, a staunch convert to Faulkner, was finding myself reading a paragraph or two and putting the book down, unimpressed by story, character, prose.

But now that I'm over that hurdle of the first seventy pages, it seems that I am getting the feeling of the interaction between the two main characters of the boy, Lucius and Boon Hoggenbeck as they 'steal' the boy's grandfather's car for some enjoyment before they are bound to return it. 

There are two main points made by this book, one being the relationship between Southern blacks and whites in the early part of the 20th century and the other being the nature of good and evil as the boy recognizes his own capacity for lying to go along with Boon's plan.

While I'm still not excited about Faulkner's narrative style in this particular novel, I do see where it was all leading and am looking forward to a more interesting story unfolding.