My second Faulkner after The Sound and the Fury, which was better. Intruder in the Dust is about a black man accused of murder in a small southern town in the 1940s, told from the perspective of a 16-year-old white boy who for complicated reasons feels the need to help him prove his innocence. If that sounds a bit like To Kill a Mockingbird it's because it really is, but I think Faulkner does the story in a more believable and interesting way in that his characters are much more morally gray. Chick, the semi-heroic boy, initially has a respect/hate relationship with the accused man, Lucas, that's based entirely on a history of each one refusing to be in debt to the other--Chick (and the rest of the town) resents that Lucas refuses to play the typical subservient role of a black man in the south. There's also an educated, genteel lawyer who at first seems to be a prototype for Atticus Finch until you find that he immediately assumes Lucas' guilt and, even when he joins in to help prove his innocence, continues to blame Lucas for bringing the whole situation on himself by being too proud for a black man. So basically I really liked that the characters who were doing the right thing still showed evidence of their culture and upbringing, which is something I never really got when I read To Kill a Mockingbird--I mean, why was Atticus Finch such a great guy? Where did that come from?

There are also some views expressed in Intruder in the Dust on the relationship between the South and the rest of the country that are complicated and probably wrong, but they are mostly expressed by the obviously flawed character of the lawyer, so I don't know if they are Faulkner's beliefs or not. He said, among other things, that the North couldn't get rid of the racial prejudices of the South, and that only the South could end its own history of racial subjugation, which its black citizens would totally understand because it would mean more to them to have their historically former masters be the ones to set them free instead of complete strangers, and until that happens they would just be happy to wait and be poor and subservient, or some such bullshit. Even if that is Faulkner's opinion, he does a pretty decent job (for a white dude of his generation) of trying to explain the racial situation of the setting, but it is a fault of this book that the black characters are mostly defined against white characters rather than as characters in their own right, so any points he's making about race issues are maybe slightly hampered by the fact that there's only one black character in here who isn't completely a cypher or a stereotype.

ETA: In one of the other reviews on LT, there's a quote from one of Faulkner's letters on the theme of the novel: "the premise being that the white people in the south, before the North or the Govt. or anybody else owe and must pay a responsibility to the negro". So it looks like that really was Faulkner's opinion, the problem being that he seems to have thought that it was okay for the white people in the south to take their sweet time finding their collective conscience while black people in the south continued to be second-class citizens. ( )

What a brilliant dustjacket design by Sydney Greenwood. Graves, cemetery, black boy and white boy.

Intruder in the Dust, his fourteenth novel, is a good introduction to Faulkner's inimitable "stream of consciousness" style. The story is fairly straightforward although with Faulkner the narrative is never simple and you have to pay close attention to get all the details.
Intruder is particularly good when focusing on the character and psychology of young Chick Mallison, the protagonist and sometimes narrator of the story. We see his growth through his confrontation with the black farmer Lucas Beauchamp and his subsequent actions in Lucas's behalf. And we experience the tension in the small town as Lucas is wrongfully accused of murder. As always there were moments of shear poetry that took my breath away with their power and beauty. Intruder was written as Faulkner's response as a Southern writer to the racial problems facing the South. In his Selected Letters, Faulkner wrote: "the premise being that the white people in the south, before the North or the Govt. or anybody else owe and must pay a responsibility to the negro".
The characters include a spinster, Miss Habersham (shades of Dickens) and a young black boy, Aleck Sander, along with Chick's uncle Gavin Stevens. Some of the characters had previously appeared in Go Down, Moses and The Hamlet. I enjoyed rereading this Faulkner novel and found that, as with all of his oeuvre, I continued to learn more about Faulkner's special fictional world. ( )

A difficult novel due to its stream of conciousness style. I encountered it as an audiobook read by a very talented narrator, and loved it -- found it alternately funny and gripping, even if less than credible. Perhaps its style lends itself more to verbalization than to visual communication. ( )

Hated it! I generally like steam of conciousness like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, ect, but Faulkner fails to use this style to help us understand the characters. I never felt any sort of emotional connection with the story or the characters. I also disagree strongly with what seems to be his major premise: The north can't force the south to change, and the south should change at it's own pace. My advice to those thinking about picking this book up...reread To Kill a Mockingbird instead. I can't believe how high a rating this book has. Somebody please explain it to me. What is great, or even good, about this book. I should also note that I like some Faulkner. As I Lay Dying was very good. ( )