THE MANSION (436 pp.)William FaulknerRandom House ($4.75).
U.S. literature registers a milestone this week: Flem Snopes is dead. His death in The Mansion closes a William Faulkner trilogy that stands alone in U.S. writing for its wild, weird comedy, its savage indictment of rapacity and greed, its haughty indifference to the reader's bewilderment as he tries to follow some of the most obscurely motivated characters in any literature. The Hamlet (TIME, April i, 1940) and The Town (TIME, May 6, 1957) proved that the Snopeses were never far from Faulkner's mind even as he...