THE author of that fine first novel, Soldiers' Pay, is here, in Mosquitoes, in an entirely different mood. He has written Mosquitoes with his tongue in his cheek and an evident desire to tell the truth about some of his friends and enemies.
The title refers to the type of people with the characteristics of the pest—buzzing nonentities, boring idiots, stinging parasites. But in telling about them Faulkner has made them as charming as humming birds to us, even if they are mosquitoes to each other.
The story tells of a yachting party of strangely assorted people. The yacht belongs to a New Orleans matron, a social climber and literary lion hunter, who collects a famous writer, a sculptor, a naive Englishman, a sex-innocent idiot, a most modern young lady and a her mechanically inclined brother (the most modern young lady has herself invited a girl from a much lower stratum of society, and her tough sweetie), and various other assorted Toms, Dicks and Harriets.
They almost all come against their better judgements: they all more or less live to regret it. But the reader does not for a moment. Their conversation is so amazingly brilliant, the things that transpire so unique and startling, the two affaires de coeur that romanticize the trip so lovely, that we are all very happy to be stowaways on the trip.
One is irresistibly reminded of South Wind by this book.
In spring, the sweet young spring, decked out with little green, necklaced, braceleted with the song of idiotic birds, spurious and sweet and tawdry as a shopgirl in her cheap finery, like an idiot with money and no taste; they were little and young and trusting, you could kill them sometimes. But now, as August like a languorous replete bird winged slowly through the pale summer toward the moon of decay and death, they were bigger, vicious; ubiquitous as undertakers, cunning as pawnbrokers, confident and unavoidable as politicians. They came cityward lustful as country boys, as passionately integral as a college football squad; pervading and monstrous but without majesty: a biblical plague seen through the wrong end of a binocular: the majesty of Fate become contemptuous through ubiquity and sheer repetition.
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