Customer Reviews

Pylon: The Corrected Text

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Set in New Orleans (referred to as New Valois in the story), "Pylon" is a rare Faulkner work that takes place outside Mississippi. In it, an unnamed, down-on-his-luck reporter follows a small crew of barnstormers in town for an air show and is smitten by the tomboyish mechanic Laverne, who is involved in a menage a trois with the pilot and the parachute jumper. Their outmoded, ramshackle plane is held together by not much more than memory, and the pilot often has to take death-defying risks in order to win competitions for their hand-to-mouth income.

Complicating their hard existence is a fourth crew member, Jiggs, who suffers from unpredictable and terrifyingly deleterious alcohol binges. The reporter's well-meaning sociability starts Jiggs on an especially noteworthy bout of drinking and sets off a serious of events with tragic consequences.

The novel contains some of the most harrowing passages of drunkenness ever composed in English. The reporter acquires a "special" bottle of absinth (which is probably just really some bad moonshine) and ends up locking himself out of his apartment in a nightmarish sequence of blurry events. Then Jiggs starts on his bender and becomes consumed with the acquisition of just one more drink. Faulkner knows drunk: these Dantesque passages are as disturbing as anything offered later by Burroughs or by Philip K. Dick.

Less real and persuasive, however, are Faulkner's portraits of New Orleans and of the barnstormers themselves. Faulkner detested the city and especially the vulgarity of Mardi gras, and his distaste infuses his descriptions with the stance of a critical bystander rather than (as in his other works) the awareness of an understanding resident. Similarly, Faulkner spent the years 1933 and 1934 flying and participating in air shows (they were even billed as "William Faulkner's Air Circus"), and the members of the crew are based on real-life counterparts, but the novel's characters feel researched rather than lived. It's clear he both loves flying and sympathizes with the hard lives of the barnstormers, but the close-woven prose seems almost in conflict with the journalistic stance of the narrative.

Reminiscent at times of "Sanctuary" (particularly of the terrifying sections describing Temple Drake's horrifying captivity among the whiskey-runners at the Goodwin place), "Pylon" contains many memorable passages on drunken, confused, despairing lives--and these passages rescue the novel from its seemingly misplaced realism. "Pylon" is less than the sum of its parts--but some of those parts are still undeniably and uniquely Faulkner.

The financial success that Faulkner realized with the publication of "Sanctuary" made one thing very clear to the author: sex and violence would sell many books. And when in 1935, as he was at work on his monumental novel, "Absalom, Absalom," and needed a break from the complexities of that novel, he turned to pruriency once again in the hopes of making a few more easy dollars. But while many other authors would have fallen back on a tried and proven type of novel, Faulkner took his art to new areas. The novel is not set in Yoknapatawpha County, but in New Orleans (New Valois in the novel) and does not concern the interwoven family of characters that he had developed over the years, but a group of barnstorming aviators who follow the air race circuit across the country. There is the foolhardy pilot, his wife, a parachute jumper and a child who might be the issue of either man. That this menage a trois is carried out in the open and with the full complicity of all three members fascinates the newspaper reporter who is assigned to cover the air meet.

No doubt this is great stuff for the making of a sensational novel. But once again Faulkner fools his readers. While it is true that the novel has the tone of many of the contemporary crime novels of his day, Faulkner throws in enough Joycean word play, obscure symbolism, and obtuse prose to make it clear that, even when trying to make a buck, the author is playing by his own rules. The influence of T.S. Eliot is everywhere and there are obvious references to Eliot's "The Hollow Men," "The Waste Land" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (one of the novel's chapters bears this title). Balanced against the literary experiments with which Faulkner was playing is a narrative that is full of excitement and sexual tension, including what surely is the first description of a "Mile High Club" encounter in literature.

This is a dark and pessimistic novel, one that looks at the uncertainty of American society created by the dehumanizing effects of the machine age. Character development is kept to a minimum and the reader never gets to know any of the characters very well. They are all, like Eliot's poem, merely hollow men adrift in an indifferent world. To enhance the general tone of malaise that permeates the novel, Faulkner sets the action during the hedonistic celebrations of Mardi Gras and the effect is startling as the reader is submerged in an atmosphere of drunkenness, aimlessness, sexual obsession, and death. But no matter how inventive the narrative style or how powerful some of the passages, the novel does not match up to Faulkner's mature fiction and is more a curiosity piece than anything else - a harrowing respite of sorts before the publication of "Absalom, Absalom."

Faulkner's humor, even in such lighthearted books as the Reivers, could never be called madcap. Even when Lena hands Byron Bunch down from the truck bed as though he were an infant, the comedy is derived from a sense of startling humiliation and debasement. That or it's as dark as shoe polish. This latter option is the case in Pylon, which, despite its overall gravity, has many funny moments.

The story: An unnamed reporter in New Valois, some forgotten hamlet with the sole distinction of having a regulation airport that hosts diverting but empty and pretentiously-hyped plane races. This reporter discovers a polyganous relationship between one pilot (Roger Schumman) and Laverne, whose shared son is of dubious origin. Then, as always happens in a Faulkner novel, a great, sinuous spate of events kicks in. The reporter is fired from his job (only to be rehired later) for obsessing over his new crew at the expense of his correspondence. Later, the reporter embezzles a considerable sum from his office (this in addition to many times cadging money from his boss) to pay for a dangerous plane for Roger to fly against the owner's wishes. Roger dies, the child falls by mother's indifference to the custody of the paternal grandparents.

Faulkner has, to my knowledge, never written a bad book. This good, but often spotty book comes the closest to out-and-out failure as any work in the Faulkner canon of which I know. I agree with an earlier reviewer, though: I'd sooner read Faulkner or Turgenev than the [stuff] most writers call popular fiction these days.

PYLON is adrenalin-charged; moving at the speed of the work's live-fast die-young dare devil pilots and their machines. The motion like a whirlwind, however; circular, like the airplanes around and around the pylon (pole marking boundary of a race). Dizzying. The characters talk like they're on acid. The unnamed Reporter of the novel is a complete mystery: How to account for his Christ-like devotion to the pilots? A devotion that far exceeds Good Samaritanism. He gains nothing by association. He is an oddity--like Melville's Bartleby. Maybe he is Christ. Maybe the Holy Ghost. Who knows? It is baffling.

I have no excuses to give for this book. Don't read it if you don't want to. Don't read it if you want literature. Don't read it if you want prurient prose (despite the other reviewers' references to sex, there is little to find in it). Don't read it if you want Faulkner. Don't read it if you want style, or flow, or popular fiction, or innovation, or a book about racing planes, or New Orleans. Don't read it if you want a good book at all.

But if you do read it, you may find something that anchors you in the heart of the imperfect as no better work can do, a failed book about failure failed, and love it as no better love could.

Faulkner's humor, even in such lighthearted books as the Reivers, could never be called madcap. Even when Lena hands Byron Bunch down from the truck bed as though he were an infant, the comedy is derived from a sense of startling humiliation and debasement. That or it's as dark as shoe polish. This latter option is the case in Pylon, which, despite its overall gravity, has many funny moments.

The story: An unnamed reporter in New Valois, some forgotten hamlet with the sole distinction of having a regulation airport that hosts diverting but empty and pretentiously-hyped plane races. This reporter discovers a polyganous relationship between one pilot (Roger Schumman) and Laverne, whose shared son is of dubious origin. Then, as always happens in a Faulkner novel, a great, sinuous spate of events kicks in. The reporter is fired from his job (only to be rehired later) for obsessing over his new crew at the expense of his correspondence. Later, the reporter embezzles a considerable sum from his office (this in addition to many times cadging money from his boss) to pay for a dangerous plane for Roger to fly against the owner's wishes. Roger dies, the child falls by mother's indifference to the custody of the paternal grandparents.

Faulkner has, to my knowledge, never written a bad book. This good, but often spotty book comes the closest to out-and-out failure as any work in the Faulkner canon of which I know. I agree with an earlier reviewer, though: I'd sooner read Faulkner or Turgenev than the [stuff] most writers call popular fiction these days.

Virtually unreadable, and really not worth the effort. Certainly that designation has been applied to the entire oeuvre of this, America's poet laureate of the South, but this novel at least lends some strength to that criticism. This is Faulkner at his worst, employing his obfuscatory style to hide the fact that he has very little to say. The plot revolves around a down-and-out newspaper reporter who shows up to cover a traveling air show in the sleepy fictional southern town of New Valois in the early 20th Century. He finds himself drawn into the personal lives of a family of barnstormers (two husbands, one wife, and one son), and plenty of hard drinking, brawling and barnstorming ensues. Faulkner was always fascinated by airplanes, and readers who are old enough to remember those halcyon days might find this a fascinating reminiscence of a somewhat sordid era in aviation history. But ultimately, this story is about the culture clash between the reporter, who cares about people too much, and the aviators, who care only about the amazing machines that they daily risk their lives in. Sadly, this man vs. machine conflict is badly dated, even by 20th Century standards, and doesn't fully succeed on any level.

Of course one has to admire the sheer technical mastery of Faulkner's writing, but much of the real emotional power of his work usually comes from his use of archetypes: the Earth Mother, the Mighty Hunter, the Soulless Businessman, the Righteously Angry Negro, the Guileless Innocent, etc.., and these archetypes not only make the story more significant - mythic, even - but they often help guide us through the complexities of the plot. In this novel the characters seem not only very specific, but very small; they are neither familiar nor important. Careful readers may be able to follow the plot of this novel, but there seems little enough impetus to bother doing so. We care less about this particular group of losers than any such in Faulkner. So while this drunken tale of planes, money and desire may find favor with completists, the rest of us would do better to get our Faulkner fix by re-reading one of his magnificent Yoknapatawpha County classics.

This novelabout an aerial stunt tam and the reporter who gets involved with them is lightweight for Faulkner. It is better than anything that hack writers like Grisham King Clancy etc. have ever written with maybe a very few exceptions an there is enough of Faulkner operating at a high level to recommend it but it is at or near the bottom of his ouvre.

Unless you have to read everything Faulkner wrote, save your time here. It's better than Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, and Sanctuary, but that isn't much to aspire to. Here and there an interesting thought comes up, but if you're short on time or energy, spend it working through Absalom, Absalom! That will save your soul. You can listen to Jagger sing Parachute Woman and get the same material in a better medium. Pylon, however, is a good word.

Not sure why this book was written except to perhaps extend Faulkner's fantasy about being a qualified pilot. Typical of the author is the use of too many adjectives and adverbs which distort the actual subject and leaves the reader wondering.

Nice jacket though.