Alcoholism, hypochondria, autism, avarice, promiscuity, and a self-destructive fixation with the past: these are the last days of the Compsons, aristocrats of the Old South. Jason III and Caroline and their children, Quentin, Candace (Caddy), Jason IV, and Benjamin (Benjy).

It’s hard to write about such a brilliant book that was, surely, such a hard book to write so brilliantly. William Faulkner chronicles a slow decline in a fractured language, where thoughts are curtailed and memories spill over. Benjy knows nothing of time, just as he knows nothing of right and wrong, of motivation and regret and anything that might constitute a kind of ideology; he knows fire and scent, the touch of flowers and the movements on the pasture, and that Caddy smelled like trees. Quentin’s time has already expired, and he races back toward it with a kind of pathetic desperation, haunted by what he didn’t do until he collapses under the knowledge that he can do no more. Jason’s time has yet to come, or has come and gone, but anyway he prepares for his moment with malice and greed and an unscrupulous sense of privilege. Dilsey endured.

Published in the months before the stock market imploded, The Sound and the Fury gained wider public attention following the success of Faulkner’s sixth novel, Sanctuary. By that time, the world was in the midst of a global economic depression. But it is not, of course, a metaphor for economic hardship – it didn’t predict the Great Depression, and anyway it comments very little on the Compson’s declining economic fortunes. When Miss Quentin finally claims the money her uncle has been embezzling from her for so long and vanishes forever, it is by no means the act that seals the family’s fate. Faulkner instead conveys with agonised precision the neglect and self-interests that tear the family apart, and arrives at the financial ruin with a kind of tired inevitability. Despite Jason’s financial acumen, whatever has been lost cannot be restored with a few thousand dollars – the last generation of Compson men, damaged and impotent, were simply unwilling or unable to perpetuate whatever legacy was left to them.

There is no rage against the dying of the light here. The Shakespearean borrowing is horribly apt: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Benjy’s idiocy, of course, allows for the purest observational passages, where the wreckage of Caddy’s behaviour is noted with clinical detachment, and responded to with wordless noises. It signifies nothing because Benjy cannot signify anything, and the world signifies nothing to him: it is all sound and fury. On reading this work a second time, I’m left with the same impression as the first time, that this is the product of a literary genius fully entitled to adopt a line from another literary genius who lived three centuries before him. Both of them knew something of the pointing and the horror.

It’s a line at the end of the penultimate part of this book that really says it all for me: “When I got better I realized what a rat he was.” That’s Sal Paradise, the book’s narrator (a pseudonym for the author, Jack Kerouac). He’s referring in that line to Dean Moriarty (another pseudonym, for Neal Cassady), his untamed travelling companion who has just abandoned the dysentery-afflicted Sal in Mexico City. That act epitomises the values and attitudes of most of the men and women who inhabit this universe: sick friends are abandoned, goods and vehicles are casually stolen, and marriages are repeatedly broken. On the Road has an infectious energy, embodied most of all by Moriarty, but it’s a not a book to fall in love with because it doesn’t have room for love – unless that love is fast, fleeting, and makes no demands (which, of course, is everything that love isn’t).

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It’s difficult to think of something to say about Lord of the Flies. Despite the somewhat nihilistic vision it presents, despite the horrendous violence which emerges in the second half of the book, it simply doesn’t affect me in the way previous books read during the course of this undertaking have. It also doesn’t help that I’m writing this a full two weeks after finishing the novel, but when I tried to compose my response then I had the same problem.

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In the introduction to my edition of The Great Gatsby, it is remarked that Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, like Ernest Hemingway’s first significant work, The Sun Also Rises, published a year later in 1926, is a “quintessentially post-World War I novel in which the events of the 1920s are perceived as direct outgrowths of changes in the national sensibility following the Armistice in 1918.” Be that as it may, in my mind Gatsby shares a closer association with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, another slim volume focused on a young man fighting to hold onto something irrecoverably lost. In Gatsby’s case that something is the unrealisable hope embodied in Daisy, but where Holden recognises with furious disapproval the futility of his desire for a dream of childhood, Gatsby by contrast remains defiant even in defeat. Whose tragedy is the greatest then – Holden’s anxious acceptance among the living, or Gatsby’s stubborn determination even in the moments before his death?

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Every goddamn phoney in the world has had their say about Mr Salinger’s book, which is funny when you think about it because it came out like a hundred years ago but everyone’s still talking about it like they’ve got something new to say or something. I don’t know, it depresses the hell out of me. I mean even the goddamn Onion wrote this funny piece after Mr Salinger died last year. What they did was, they phrased it so that it sounded like old Salinger would have written it, and it was certainly original and all, but it’s too original, if you get my meaning, so everyone else is going to do the same goddamn thing.

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