All through this book I was thinking how similar in style it is to Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!". It's a long nightmare, about a 40 weight Faulkner. Where Absalom is 90 weight gear oil, and "The Sound and the Fury" is about 60 weight. Long paragraphs, rants and raves, all told by a narrator who wasn't there and didn't know what really happened. Uncanny how similar that is to Absalom.
But he doesn't have Faulkner's vocabulary, and his writing is fairly easy to understand. That's not to say the novel is easy to read. I like some plot, and the loose ends are never tied up in this novel. It's character driven, of course. We know the ending in the beginning of the novel, so that's not as bad as it sounds, but it would have been so much more satisfying if he had wrapped it up in the end. It is consistent, though, all the way through, and well written.
It's also "telling, not showing", all the way. Incredible amounts of navel gazing - I had to skim. And the narrator never makes an appearence at the end, after being so very important in the beginning - that was strange.
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