Fifteen years ago Cleanth Brooks published William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. It was then and remains now the best single critical work on the novels of Faulkner's fictional saga. In the years that followed, many of Brooks's readers looked forward to the promised companion volume that would deal with the works Faulkner set beyond the boundaries of his apocryphal county. From time to time essays appeared which gave previews, essays ranging from Faulkner's poetry to his view of history. Now at last he has gathered most of them together, revised them, and added new chapters, appendices, and notes to form William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. It was worth waiting for. (p. 145)

[Brooks] has read a great deal of [Faulkner] criticism and put it to excellent use. But the very abundance of bad or indifferent criticism makes this new volume, like its fellow, not only particularly welcome but necessary and important. Both should be required reading for every Faulkner scholar and critic. They display the qualities that have made Cleanth Brooks our best critic whether he was writing on poetry or fiction, American literature or British: remarkable erudition, broad historical consciousness, penetrating insight, sympathetic sensitivity, blessed common sense, and the ability to express them in a flexible prose that is clear, straightforward, and persuasive. It instructs at the same time that it entertains, moving with ease from the formal to the colloquial. (pp. 145-46)

Dealing with early novels such as Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, the author skillfully performs the task of analyzing their true merits while even-handedly assessing their signs of immaturity. He avoids the tactic of critics who belabor these books as a means of demonstrating the excellences of those which followed. If the former is uneven, it is also stylistically brilliant; if the latter is at once unfocused and overly demanding, it too is marked by the same brilliance.

Brooks supplies the same exemplary demonstration of the critic's function—explaining and evaluating—with the two novels that came ten years later: Pylon and The Wild Palms. Though they have not received as much attention as the sequence of great novels which began with The Sound and the Fury, they do reveal aspects of Faulkner's unique genius. Throughout this book Brooks spells out relevant connections with arguments in his earlier one…. This new book's chapter on A Fable treats in detail some of the problems Faulkner tried, with varying success, to solve. The very assertiveness with which he proclaimed its importance indicated his deep misgivings. Brooks's close examination of its theological premises, and even more, the practical problems involved in the machinations of the Old General on behalf of the High Command (treated so elaborately by Faulkner), shows how troubled was this excursion of the master beyond the boundaries of his apocryphal county. Although Brooks does not belabor this dichotomy in Faulkner's fiction, his exploration of the interaction between locale on the one hand and character and action on the other helps to explain the extraordinary power of the Yoknapatawpha novels and the way in which Faulkner's genius not only derived strength from his native region but also permitted him to use it to extract the general from the particular.

The essays on Sutpen and the narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! do not fit neatly into the predominant concern with the non-Yoknapatawpha writings, but it is good to have them here, summarizing as they do Brooks's work over the past fifteen years on the novel he considers Faulkner's greatest. The question of the extent to which Sutpen is a planter like Sartoris or Compson or de Spain is crucial for the novel's significance, which is widened by Brooks's argument that Sutpen belongs to a much more nearly universal type. In the essay on the narrative structure he does what he has done so well before … he leads the reader through Faulkner's complexities and intricacies, not only making them more easily understandable but also showing how they function in the novel's ultimate meaning. A particularly impressive demonstration is his careful reconstruction of the way the interview must have transpired between Quentin Compson and Henry Sutpen shortly before the latter's death. When so much written about Faulkner appears not only impressionistic but more like a self-administered verbal Rorschach test than literary criticism, Brooks performs a brilliant explication de texte, extrapolating from it the probable nature of this crucial encounter which brings Quentin, whose mind Faulkner describes as "a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts," face to face with one of them. (pp. 146-47)

Cleanth Brooks reaffirms in this book his position as the best critic of our best novelist. Anyone who cares about Faulkner's work—current readers and those to come—will be in his debt. (p. 148)