Novel: The Reivers

Overview
William Faulkner’s The Reivers is a genial, picaresque caper set in 1905 that doubles as a late-career meditation on honor, memory, and change in the American South. Told by an older Lucius Priest looking back on his boyhood, the novel recounts the misadventure that first carried him from the ordered streets of his Mississippi town into a wider, more complicated world. Faulkner tempers his trademark Yoknapatawpha County lore with an unusually buoyant tone, shaping a coming-of-age tale that is also a warm comedy of human foible and forgiveness.

Plot
Eleven-year-old Lucius lives in Jefferson, Mississippi, where his respectable family has just acquired a gleaming new automobile, an emblem of modernity that electrifies the town. When his parents are called away, the family’s impulsive retainer Boon Hoggenbeck seizes the moment, “borrows” the car, and coaxes Lucius along for the ride. Ned McCaslin, a canny Black kinsman of the family with his own quiet agenda, furtively joins them, and the trio points the nose of the car toward Memphis, the nearest big city and a magnet for trouble.

In Memphis they land at a high-toned brothel run with formidable efficiency by Miss Reba. There Lucius is treated with unusual courtesy, and Boon falls for a young woman, Corrie, whose weariness with her trade begins to give way to hopes of a different life. Ned disappears and reemerges having traded the car for a racehorse, forcing the group into a harebrained scheme: if they can make the dubious animal win at a country track, they can pay off the debt and reclaim the automobile. What follows is a sequence of scrapes, petty swindles, sabotage, backroom negotiations, through which Lucius must lie, fight, and endure shame, then learn how to set matters right.

With help from a sympathetic trainer and Ned’s shrewd horsemanship, the horse comes good at the crucial moment. The winnings and some careful diplomacy secure the car’s return. Lucius’s family arrives in time to restore order without crushing the boy, recognizing the courage and loyalty he has shown amid his errors. Back in Jefferson, the memory of the escapade lingers as an initiation into the fragile balance between impulse and responsibility.

Characters
Lucius narrates with the rueful clarity of age, measuring his boyish bravado against the adult codes he only dimly grasped. Boon, big-hearted and reckless, embodies the South’s swaggering vitality, forever one impulsive act from disaster. Ned, patient and observant, navigates a racist world with wit and strategy, quietly steering outcomes others claim as their own. Corrie emerges as the story’s moral surprise, a woman set on remaking herself; Miss Reba presides with brisk intelligence over a house that is less sordid than the hypocrisies beyond its doors.

Themes
The novel turns on the education of conscience: what it costs to tell the truth, to accept blame, to defend the vulnerable. It weighs class and race with gentle exactness, showing how power operates in favors, debts, and performances of respectability. The automobile, new, noisy, liberating, signals a South in transition, while the horse race, with its folk cunning and communal theater, clings to older rituals. Storytelling itself becomes an ethic, as the elder Lucius re-creates his youthful misjudgments to teach what endurance and decency look like when imperfect people try to do right.

Setting and Style
From dusty Jefferson streets to Memphis parlors and a raucous rural track, the settings carry Faulkner’s sense of place without his earlier labyrinths. The prose flows with tall-tale ease, humorous and affectionate, attentive to dialect yet lucid in design, granting even minor figures a comic dignity.

Ending and Legacy
Order restored, Lucius returns home chastened but enlarged, carrying a standard of honor he will spend a lifetime keeping. Boon and Corrie’s bond points toward redemption wrested from misrule. Published in 1962, the novel’s warmth and generosity helped earn Faulkner a posthumous Pulitzer, sealing his career with a smile that still recognizes the costs of growing up.