One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini. Perennial, 2005. $29.95 — 528 pp.

Norman Mailer had just written a piece in which he argued that white people were afraid of the black man’s sexual potency and therefore resisted integration, that they preferred the old arrangement of slavery in which where they got to cuckold black men because they were in a superior position. Faulkner was being baited, but he refused to enter into real dialogue with Mailer, whom he found ridiculous. “I have heard this idea expressed several times in the last twenty years,” he wrote back sometime during the summer of 1957, “though not before by a man. The others were ladies, northern or middle western ladies, usually around 40 or 45 years of age. I don’t know what a psychiatrist would find in this.” Mailer, of course, was outraged by the response, but he deserved what he got. His provocative and narrow-minded notions were, at best, laughable.

The above passage from Jay Parini’s One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner demanded lengthy quotation for two reasons. First, it offers a humorous look at Norman Mailer, who, like so many New Yorkers, is far more provincial than he could ever imagine. Though many of Mailer’s contemporaries are still read today — Joseph Heller, for instance, or Jack Kerouac — Mailer himself surely has a small audience, both because much of his writing was trash (as was Kerouac’s) and because some of his pieces—”The Time Of Her Time” and An American Dream come immediately to mind — were brilliant, but are probably more offensive today, after 40 years of feminist influence in literature, than they were when published.

But enough of Mailer. Though another biography of the South’s greatest 20th century writer may seem like a case of overkill, Parini does do a service to general readers who may be intimidated by the Blotner biography or uninterested in literary criticism of Faulkner’s work. Parini offers that literary criticism in a painless fashion, yet he does a more than adequate job of examining the plots and characters of Faulkner’s books, relating them to their influences, largely in Mississippi, and interpreting the themes of the books.

Parini also does a fine job of tracing the events of Faulkner’s life, of putting in the background of the many places Faulkner lived: Mississippi, New Orleans, New York, Hollywood, Charlottesville. Parini has a talent for sketching in a place so that it comes alive for the reader, thereby enabling us to see Faulkner in his little room in Pirate’s Alley in New Orleans or in the hunt country of Albemarle County. Readers of One Matchless Time (the phrase, “one matchless time,” was used by Faulkner to describe his great creative period between 1928 and 1942) should finish it with a clear idea of people and places that mattered most in Faulkner’s life.

Where Parini excels, however, may also be detected in the above passage. He gives us Faulkner not just as some sort of corn-pone anecdotal figure, but as a man who suffered for his art, who was an alcoholic and a bit of a womanizer, a writer who fought off debt with several stints in Hollywood. Parini isn’t afraid of being judgmental, as in his opinion of Mailer in the above passage, and he is frequently critical of Faulkner as well. He also shows us throughout the book why Faulkner will be read when the books of so many other writers will have turned to dust on the shelves. “Only Charles Dickens and Balzac among novelists before Faulkner created such a wealth of characters,” Parini tells us. He points out that uneven quality of Faulkner’s books, but then tells us that “Faulkner took huge risks in his fiction, reaching far and wide for effects, daring incoherence itself, believing that he could and would snatch pieces of order from the general chaos of experience.”

Parini has written many other books — novels, poetry, biographies — and perhaps it is this prolificacy that leads to some carelessness in his writing. In the opening paragraph above, we read “in which where they got to,” a part of a sentence that screams for the red ink of an editor’s pen. On page 48, Parini tells us that Faulkner in 1919 “sat at home, reading and dreaming ... and generally making himself a nuisance,” yet he doesn’t show us how Faulkner was a nuisance. On the previous page, he tells us that Hemingway was with the Italian army, but was wounded as an ambulance driver in France. Hemingway never served in France; he received his wound in Fossalta, a village near Mestre.

Despite these indiscrepancies — and they do matter, if you’re going to write a biography and you want the reader to trust your facts — One Matchless Time is a book worth reading both for Faulkner fans and for newcomers to the work of the bard of Mississippi.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)