Just Finished Reading Light in August by William Faulkner

A few years ago Oprah Winfrey selected three of early twentieth century American writer William Faulkner's novels for her book club: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August.  The first, the most famous of the three, I have yet to read...and the second I read back in 2014.  A couple of years ago I read his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust...I thought it was a good time to delve into another of his works, so I read Light in August.  As with other stories of his, the locale is Faulkner's fictional Jefferson County in Mississippi during the time he wrote in, the 1920s and 30s.  A young woman, Lena Grove, has largely walked here from her home in Alabama...she is looking for the father of the child she is pregnant with, who came here to find work and had promised to marry her: Lucas Burch, who is now going under the name Joe Brown.  He gets a job at the local mill where he meets with two other of the story's main characters, Byron Bunch and  Joe Christmas.  Bunch is upright and wants to do the good thing for Lena, with whom he has become smitten, while Christmas has led a life believing that since...at least in his own mind...he is partially black, then he consequently belongs to neither of the severely racially segregated communities in the South in this era.  Bunch also confides regularly with a disgraced former minister, Gail Hightower, who has his own story to tell as well.  And the story of Joanna Burden, descended from abolitionists who moved into the area following the Civil War and who now lives in reclusion, adds a further tragic dimension to the story.  The language used by the novel's characters reflects that of the sharply segregated and discriminatory Deep South of the Jim Crow era...it's pretty racist, to say the least, so if you're into retroactive political correctness you might want to avoid the many "n" words sprinkled throughout.  Faulkner bluntly lays out the prejudice against blacks of his white characters and their society at large...this story is definitely not a presentation of America living up to its stated ideals.  He also very intensively goes into the life histories of his characters, meticulously analyzing their distinctively individual personalities and the experiences they had which shaped them.  I felt uncomfortable reading Light in August, and for good reason: I had difficulty bonding with any of the characters the way most fiction presents a clear, central protagonist to focus on.  Hightower and Bunch did present a sense of reason, Christmas' childhood past drew some sympathy from me, Lena's predicament with her situation did as well in its own way, and Joanna Burden's story was compelling...but that Lucas Burch had no redeeming qualities that I could see.  The author did such a good job with his characterizations that I'm tempted to look around me and see this or that bit of a character's personality in different people...including myself.  One other thing: Light in August wildly jumps around in time with multitudes of flashbacks...that, combined with no clear central protagonist, might make this a difficult reading choice.  But I still recommend it for being a cultural snapshot of a time in our history as well as a sobering look at people not at their best moments...