A Portrait of a Dysfunctional Family

Years ago when I was a young and cocky freelance magazine writer—as opposed to being an older, wiseass fiction writer—I cold called author Ken Kesey in Oregon (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among others) and proposed writing a profile of him.

The first thing Kesey asked me was, “Have you read any Faulkner?” The best I could admit to was the opening chapter of A Light in August.

“How can you call yourself a writer?” he said, before turning me down, explaining that he had nothing to say.

Several years ago I returned to Faulkner, this time to read As I Lay Dying, a story of the dysfunctional Bundren family of Mississippi and their trek across the state to bury their mother. The novel included several interesting tidbits:

• The opening scene of the mother, near death, watching and listening as her oldest son builds her coffin outside the bedroom window, as the rest of the family stands around horrified.
• Even though their mother is about to die, two of the sons leave to perform an odd job. They return and are still a ways off when they are tipped off to their mother’s death by the buzzards circling their home.
• After the mother is placed in the coffin the youngest son, seven years old, bores holes into the lid, concerned that she can’t breath—only the drill bit goes through the coffin lid and into the face of the corpse.

It gets better. Gotta read the novel.

Well, the actor James Franco directed and stars in the film version, and also wrote the screenplay. The world premier is next week, May 20, at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Read the piece in the film site Ropes of Silicon and see the trailer.

As I Lay Dying was a great novel, especially if you have an appreciation for screwed-up families. The movie is on my must-see list.  

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

Comments

[Nancy Dent Eckert]

And, as well, I was warned off of James Joyce and Wagner. Fortunately, nothing took.