This book, Faulkner’s grave meditation on race, violence and all the fraught legacies of the South, is the first in which he confronted head-on the poisons of racism. Joe Christmas believes himself to be of mixed race. (His parentage is uncertain.) He has escaped from a miserable childhood to the town of Jefferson, Miss., where he unleashes his demons. Lena Grove has come there, too, looking for the father of the child she is carrying while Christmas fulfills his wretched destiny. This book is less daring structurally than The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. Though time still folds back on itself, so that events seem to take place in a zone beyond normal chronology, the flashbacks are easier to follow. But the force of Faulkner’s genius is in entirely in play.