Since the time he started writing, it seems to have been [Styron's] conscious aim to perpetuate the great tradition in Southern literature, and to assume the throne left vacant by William Faulkner by producing something that, in terms of both its themes and its historical scope, could merit comparison with The Sound and the Fury, Look Homeward, Angel, and All the King's Men…. Styron's first published book, Lie Down in Darkness, [was] treated with almost universal respect and had epithets like "brilliant," "major," and "tragic" showered upon it. Lie Down in Darkness, as befitted its author, had ambition written over its every page—it represented a deliberate stab at greatness—and the fact that Styron could back his ambitions up with an extraordinarily seductive style (by turns descriptive, lyrical, and elegiac) more or less guaranteed its initial success. It was almost too easy, thanks to the prodigious brilliance of its language and the intricacy of its narrative structure, to read more into the book than was actually there.
Not that Lie Down in Darkness is a poor or uninteresting novel—far from it. It is, I believe, a fascinating and to some extent a perceptive one because—whether Styron intended it or not—it presents us with such an honest account of the author's own predicament. It is, in a way, profoundly autobiographical;… the area of autobiography it deals with bears upon Styron's problems as a Southern writer…. Lie Down in Darkness concerns itself with one family, the Loftis family, living in Port Warwick, Virginia. In actual clock time it covers the events of one day, during which the body of the older daughter, Peyton Loftis, is brought back from New York for burial. But, in describing this particular day, the author reaches back continually into the past to investigate the circumstances leading to Peyton's death, which came at her own hands; and in the process the book becomes an intensive exploration of the family's almost effortless self-destruction…. [The] various members of the Loftis family constitute one another's Hell; their home life is a kind of prison house from which they are unable and, because of their mutual dependence, unwilling, even, to escape. (pp. 285-86)
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