Will Oprah's Book Club really turn these pages?

There are perhaps pleasanter places to spend your summer vacation than Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County (pop. 15,611). Places less riddled with violence, insanity, incest, and despair - like the Black Hole of Calcutta, for example.

But since Oprah Winfrey revved up the engine on her literary tour bus Friday and headed South, Americans are turning the 2,400 fictional square miles created by one William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor, into the No. 2 bookish destination of the season. (Apparently, it takes more than a Nobel Prize and a couple of Pulitzers to unseat Harry Potter.)

With 500,000 copies of "As I Lay Dying," "Light in August," and "The Sound and the Fury" being tossed in beach bags with the latest by James Patterson, it seems appropriate to offer new readers an introduction to the self-styled "failed poet" of Oxford, Miss.

Considering the years Faulkner spent working the night shift in a power plant (where he wrote "As I Lay Dying") and his disastrous stint as a postmaster who was prone to throwing out the mail, it seems unfair that he's missed out on his runaway bestsellerdom. Even after he was established, Faulkner still had to moonlight as a Hollywood screenwriter, since his head-on confrontation of the legacy of slavery and the South's defeat in the Civil War led to some shocking stuff. In the 1940s, 17 of his titles were out of print. That may also have to do with the fact that no one ever accused him of talking down to the reader. Faulkner's version of Southern Gothic comes larded with biblical symbolism and is delivered stream-of-consciousness.

His subject, as he declared in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, is "the human heart in conflict with itself."

Despite the high mortality rate among Yoknapatawphans, Faulkner vehemently rejected the idea that his work was despairing. "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will be one more sound: his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

That contrast between the degradation his characters endure and his stated belief in the ultimate triumph of mankind led the Monitor to headline him "The Paradoxical William Faulkner" in 1951. He makes for fascinating company, no matter the season.

Light in August

If you don't know Faulkner, you can't be considered a "serious" reader, Ms. Winfrey declared when making her selections. Folks who bypassed "Absalom, Absalom!" for Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" or Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" might beg to differ. But if you're tired of being thought a frivolous lightweight by your friends, start with "Light in August." It's not any less tragic than the other two - in fact, it's the most genuinely heartbreaking - but it offers some decency and hope around the edges.

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