ABSTRACT
Although Mr. Faulkner is on a number of counts the most interesting contemporary American writer of fiction there is good ground for doubting that he is on his way to becoming quite first-rate as a novelist. All his readers agree that he can tell a story and that his use oflanguage is dazzling; the general public buy his novels also because he gives them shivers and satiates their prurience; while the aestheticians are fascinated by his experiments in form. He is perhaps the only American whose achievement in this latter respect is at all comparable with that ofJoyce, Mann, or Mrs. W 001£ After their several fashions, these writers have brought the novel closer to poetry, which in tum has aspired to the condition of the even more formal arts of music and painting. It is likely that the novel can no longer be the amorphous and pedestrian affair that it has been too often in the past, but there is also reason to believe that its matter will continue to be no less important than the manner. Mann and Joyce are bulky at least partly because they have something of consequence to say, while Mrs. Woolf's work appears slighter and Faulkner's tangential because their virtues reside almost wholly in the saying.
