Reminscening on a new Faulkner

I’m not sure what to say about The Reivers. It was Faulkner’s last novel and the winner of a Nobel Prize in literature. For a book that was, in a sense, Faulkner’s coup de grace, it is uncharacteristically Faulkner. The style is off, the tone is too light, and the novel was overall too happy to be the Faulkner I know. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the novel. I’m a fan of the picaresque novel and believe that it is the dominant form of epic in modernity, so this may have been Faulkner’s step toward an epic (attempting to tie and tie up characters and story lines from his Yoknapatawpha), but this jaunty, reminiscent, “story” is unlike Faulkner from days gone by.
The Reivers does, in fact, carry the markings of Faulknerian novels. It is plagued with convoluted run-on sentences, long and winding paragraphs, and a not-quite but almost stream of consciousness narrative. But the overall effect of the novel is just not like Faulkner’s other novels, like The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! It is the story of two members of the McCaslin/Edmonds family from Go Down Moses—Lucius Priest and the black servant/relative Ned NcCaslin—,along with a family retainer—Boon Hogganbeck, also mentioned in Go Down Moses—who steal a car and head to Memphis. Boon wants to go to the city to woo a prostitute, Luscius, only eleven at the time, goes with Boon, and Ned hides out in the back of the car. Once in Memphis, Boon begins to court Miss Corrie, Luscius comes of age and must grapple with his turmoil over explaining what he see with the way he was raised, and Ned sells the car they stole to buy a horse in the hopes of racing it and earning money. The majority of the plot is somewhat irrelevant to my point, so I’ll skip to the end. Luscius’ grandfather, the owner of the car, finds the boys in Memphis. Ned, slyly playing the old man, bets against his own horse in a second race and purposely loses. The whole story ends on the happy note that Boon and his prostitute Miss Corrie have married and have named their first child after Luscius. This “it all works out in the end” feeling is so unlike Faulkner that it is almost jarring to the avid reader. The Reivers was a best seller, adapted later in a film, and think that attests to that fact that it is somehow different that Faulkner’s other works. It is easier to read and relate to than most of the novels we have read so far.
That being said, I still believe that The Reivers is a great work. Luscius Priest’s monologues on virtue, his idea of women, and his conception of smart animals make him a highly complex and intelligent character. I would like to someday take a more in-depth look at Luscius, as his role of narrator of the story adds a great deal to his character than I believe a lot of people see.