The Reivers
by William Faulkner
Summary
In 1905 Lucius Priest is eleven, the family is away at a funeral, and Boon Hogganbeck wants the car. It is Lucius's grandfather's Winton Flyer, one of two automobiles in Jefferson, Mississippi, and Boon, who is enormous, devoted and about as dependable as weather, intends to drive it to Memphis. Lucius comes along as an accomplice because the alternative is being left behind. Ned William McCaslin, the family's Black coachman and much the cleverest person in the book, turns up in the back of it uninvited.
Memphis means Miss Reba's brothel, which Faulkner's readers already know, and where Boon has a claim on a woman named Everbe Corinthia. Then Ned trades the car, which is not his, for a stolen racehorse, and the only route back to a car is to win a race with a horse that will not run. Ned knows how to make it run. Lucius, being eleven and light, is the one who has to ride it.
Faulkner tells it straight, as a grandfather talking to a grandson, under the subtitle A Reminiscence, and it is the most accessible book he wrote: plain sentences, a clean chronology, and the jokes landing where jokes are supposed to land.
It is also about what it costs a child to be made complicit, and the last hundred pages are quietly serious about that.
Around three hundred pages, warm, comic and unmistakably his.
Best for readers who have been told Faulkner is hard and want the entry point, and for readers who know Yoknapatawpha well and want to watch him take one last easy lap around it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Reivers was published on 4 June 1962 and William Faulkner died a month later, on 6 July, so the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded posthumously. It was his second in fiction, after A Fable in 1955, and the book was a bestseller.
Faulkner had talked for years about closing his career with what he called a Golden Book of Yoknapatawpha County, and this is the nearest he came. Boon, Ned, Miss Reba and the McCaslins all belong to books he had been writing since the 1920s, and the arrival of the automobile in Jefferson is the beginning of the end of the world those books describe.
Scholars have generally treated it as minor, partly because it is easy, and that is a hard reputation to shift. Mark Rydell filmed it in 1969 with Steve McQueen as Boon and Rupert Crosse as Ned, and Crosse was nominated for an Academy Award for the part.