The Reivers was a popular novel in part because it tells a wonderfully complicated tall tale to a considerable extent in Faulkner's characteristically difficult style and yet is fairly accessible, very funny, and both risque and wholesome in a sense that American readers tend to like.

Somewhat like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), this story takes an innocent boy with a sure sense of right and wrong into a wild world of gambling, debauchery, prostitution, horse-racing, political corruption, and rowdiness. His negotiation of these difficulties with his personal sense of honor more or less intact makes for a moral adventure in an immoral world.

At the novel's center is a moral purpose, the passing on of a tradition of moral behavior, of an ideal of the gentleman. As a story of moral education for young people and of coming of age in a complex and...