Mary Lee Settle's impracticably titled Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday works out to a consistent, overall 86-proof Faulkner. The story in essence is Hannah McKarkle's (no kidding!) investigations into her charming doomed dead brother Jonathan. It is a story told with multiple flashbacks into the time past of the close family, the extended family, and the entire sordid little section of Appalachia which is Miss Settle's chosen beat. Indeed, the muddling of past with present is the story; but it will take an alert and almost passionately cooperative reader to undo the tangle which results. Faulkner imposes at least as heavy a burden of decipherment, but rewards us, at his best, with a bewildered, vociferous intensity; Miss Settle's prose is less radioactive by far. Besides, the charming doomed young man is a fragile, even volatile problem for investigation; the more specific reasons one finds for his condition—and Faulkner at least wouldn't have been afraid to have the narrator look straight at herself for a while—the less charming and doomed he is bound to appear. Thus the hard work of psychic understanding soon vaporizes away into unconvincing social commentary, and the villain of this book appears as white Protestant bourgeois respectability or technological unemployment or something like that. In a novel ostensibly devoted to him, Johnny himself never figures as much more than a pretext—which, with the proper ironies, might be all right too; but they're muted out of existence, and the novel struck me as a flawed performance. Eloquent in many passages it surely is, and interestingly, thoughtfully constructed; but not focussed or resourceful enough, to keep the reader content. (p. 16)
Robert M. Adams, "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: 'Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday'," in The New York Review of Books (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books; copyright © 1964 Nyrev, Inc.), Vol. II, No. 11, July 9, 1964, pp. 14-16.
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