I read Faulkner's novel Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] yesterday. I was led to read it because a friend had the quote "Between grief and nothing I will take grief" on his gchat status, which struck me as very personally relevant right now, so I asked him about it and found out that it was from Wild Palms. The book intrigued me even more because the more recent title (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) is a reference to Psalm 137, which I am newly familiar with this year thanks to observing Tisha B'Av for the first time.
**WARNING: BEGINNING OF SPOILERS**
So, the book is two stories interwoven, "Wild Palms" and "Old Man." In "Wild Palms," I was struck by the romantic relationship between the two protagonists. The basic thing is that the man, Wilbourne, falls in love with a married woman, Charlotte, and the two go off together, with the husband's bitter consent. Throughout the story, Wilbourne and Charlotte have conversations about the nature of marriage and love. Time after time, they uproot themselves from whatever life they are living, when they start feeling "too married." When Wilbourne feels bad about not always being able to support Charlotte (he has difficulty finding jobs because employers find out that he is "living in sin"), Charlotte reminds him that she didn't go off with him because she wanted another husband. The arrangement that they have is a fairly scathing comment on marriage--and, not incidentally, on capitalism. The two choose to live in very harsh conditions, because it seems that only under conditions of physical suffering and financial scarcity are they able to maintain some kind of authenticity of feeling. Every time they drift toward stability and comfort, they find themselves bound up in the pursuit of "respectability"--which seems to terrify them more than anything else.
