Good morning,

I have a quick question for you.  I've read a couple of your posts about
FINN (which are spot-on, in my opinion) and wonder if you've written
anything up at all.  I'm especially interested in your take on the
problems associated with Clinch's presentation of race.  My sense is
that Clinch "borrowed" from Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST.  (Pap Finn and
his pathologies remind me for some reason of Joe Christmas, for
example.  The prose style, I think, is also very Faulknerian
throughout.  There are additional echoes, but you get the point.)  The
problem, as I see it, is that if Clinch indeed modeled Pap Finn after
anything like a Joe Christmas, he did something very problematic in
using one man's mid-twentieth-century obsession with race to represent
what comes across in FINN as a plausible antebellum racial attitude
shared by a number of characters.  In other words, I'm not sure that a
Joe Christmas--with his peculiar racial pathologies--could have existed
in the 1840s.  Do you?  Does this make any sense?  I'm still struggling
to articulate what it is I'm going for, so I wonder if you have any
insight you might share.  No worries if nothing occurs to you.

Hope you're well.

All best,
Joe