Knight's Gambit (1949)

Summary

Blanche Hixson Smith. “King's Gambit [sic]:” Meriden (Conn.) Record, November 11, 1949, p. 6.

“A new book by America's foremost novelist,” is the Random House statement on the jacket of William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit just released from that publishing house. William Faulkner is certainly famous. This is his eighteenth volume and most of its predecessors are available in many translations in as many foreign countries. We are not sure whether he should be called “America's foremost,” but he certainly slings English with powerful force. Likewise he has no formidable rival in his own generation to dispute with him the championship as teller-of-tales. He can make a simple story both exciting and profound.

However the story, or rather stories in Knight's Gambit are not simple. The book is really five separate stories told by a single narrator and built upon the activities in pursuit of justice-with-mercy of Uncle Gavin Stevens, who has appeared in other Faulkner stories about this same Mississippi county. We finished the first section entitled “Smoke” with great excitement. “Here”, we said, “is the GREAT AMERICAN WRITER.” The story is a superb study of twin brothers in whom inherited traits of character develop with such vast difference. Moreover these brothers are actors in a tremendously exciting mystery,–a whodunit of the cleverest type. Uncle Gavin is more interested in justice than in truth. He proceeds to demonstrate that there are tricks in all trades, and when the trick of a county prosecutor brings the real criminal to light it is justified. But then we turned to the next chapter about a pathetic character named Monk.