Pylon

By William Faulkner

One of the few of William Faulkner’s works to be set outside his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Pylon, first published in 1935, takes place at an air show in a thinly disguised New Orleans named New Valois. An unnamed reporter for a local newspaper tries to understand a very modern ménage a trois of flyers on the brainstorming circuit. These characters, Faulkner said, “were a fantastic and bizarre phenomenon on the face of the contemporary scene. . . . That is, there was really no place for them in the culture, in the economy, yet they were there, at that time, and everyone knew that they wouldn’t last very long, which they didn’t. . . . That they were outside the range of God, not only of respectability, of love, but of God too.” In Pylon Faulkner set out to test their rootless modernity to see if there is any place in it for the old values of the human heart that are the central concerns of his best fiction.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780735253773

William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all American novelists and short-story writers.  His other works include the novels The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, and Sanctuary.  He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and in 1949 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews for Pylon

[margaretfield · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

group of barn stormers whose lives are thoroughly unconventional

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

As much as I love Faulkner, I cannot summon any enthusiasm for this one. I don't think I've ever managed to read it all the way through before, and I did so this time just because I felt I ought to. It's a mess...the kind of thing people write when they're trying to mock Faulkner, full of rambling incoherent thoughtsentences and words like "thoughtsentences". The action takes place during "Moddy Graw" in a city that is obviously New Orleans, but which Faulkner inexplicably calls "New Valois". He even changes the name of the state to "Franciana". It just screams at the reader every time it's mentioned. Giving Oxford, Mississippi, a fictitious name and creating a county called Yoknapatawpha in his large body of work makes sense...Jefferson and its environs could be in any number of places in the deep south. There's only one New Orleans, and there is nothing else remotely like it in the country. The main character in [Pylon] is a man without a name, "the reporter", who becomes obsessed with a threesome of air show performers and their young child. (One woman, two men, nobody really knows which one is the child's father, although the woman is married to one of them. Speculation is that there was a coin toss involved.) Most of the men are drunk most of the time, and plain stupid the rest of it. The woman is flat, unaffected and a significant slug of ammunition in the war over whether Faulkner was a misogynist. Only the child has any redeeming qualities, and he is probably doomed, even after he's sent to live with his supposed paternal grandparents, one of whom has no more sense than to burn money in the kitchen stove because of where he thinks it came from. For a handful of authentically funny moments, I give this novel a reluctant single star. I cannot recommend it to anyone.