Padgett Powell is one of the most linguistically inventive American authors and one of the fiction writers of the contemporary South who follows the tracks laid by William Faulkner, the man Flannery O'Connor once described as the "big train." "The first thing I ever wrote was bad Faulkner," admits Powell in his contributor's note in a 1997 issue of The Oxford American magazine, which featured his autobiographical essay "On Coming Late to Faulkner". In the article Powell addresses his former self, the unpublished neophyte, in relation to Faulkner: "[You] with your two-cylinder syntax are a mule and cart being borne down by the Dixie Limited. Fond mocking is, actually, all that you can do, given the roar of the train that blasts you from the track." One might say the same of the mature and successful Powell, whose "fond mocking" is not always easy to digest, with his goofy...