The Reivers

Faulkner frames the whole escapade — Lucius Priest's grandfather's car 'borrowed' by Boon Hogganbeck for a joyride to Memphis, with young Lucius smuggled along and the family's Black companion Ned McCaslin engineering an elaborate horse-race swindle to get the car back — as retrospective narration, an old man remembering the week that actually made him an adult, and the novel's warmth comes from how completely Faulkner refuses to punish Lucius for what he witnesses: brothels, corruption, violence, and a stolen horse race are all rendered as an education rather than a fall, the exact inverse of the doom that structures most of his Yoknapatawpha fiction.

Ned McCaslin's horse-racing scheme — trading the stolen car for a racehorse he's certain, on almost mystical faith, can be trained to win, then rigging the actual race through means he won't fully explain — makes Ned, technically a servant in the Priest household, the story's real engineer of events, and Faulkner lets his competence and cunning run circles around every white character in the book without ever making that irony didactic; it's simply how the plot resolves, Ned proven right about the horse and about nearly everything else.

Miss Corrie, the Memphis prostitute Boon loves and eventually marries, and the brothel itself, presented without the moral horror such a setting would carry elsewhere in Faulkner, mark the novel's larger argument about mercy: Lucius's grandfather, learning everything that happened on the trip, chooses forgiveness and discretion over punishment, teaching Lucius — and the novel insists this is the actual lesson of becoming an adult — that a gentleman's job isn't avoiding wrongdoing entirely but knowing how to behave, and whom to protect, after you've already done it.

Published in 1962, months before Faulkner's death, and awarded a second, posthumous Pulitzer Prize, The Reivers is by far his most linear, plainly comic novel, trading the dense, doom-laden modernism of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! for a picaresque, retrospectively narrated tall tale closer in spirit to Mark Twain than to his own earlier reputation. Critics have debated ever since whether the shift represents late mastery — a writer finally allowing his fictional county some grace — or simply a gentler late style; either way, ending a career built on Yoknapatawpha's tragedies with a novel this forgiving reads, in hindsight, like a deliberate final gesture.