The sequel to his first Faulkner book, Fictions of Labor, Richard Godden's William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words features more tremendously insightful criticism, focussing this time on the labor conditions of the South of the United States of the 1940s and 1950s where he formerly dealt with the 1930s. For readers who enjoyed and admired the first volume, this one offers vintage Godden and potentially paradigm-shifting criticism.

Godden seeks to read signs as signifying presence rather than absence. Specifically, he is interested in the presence of the economic – which are social – dynamics that reside deep in the structures (both visible and invisible) of language. For Godden, economy of currency and economy of words are interreferential twins. Relentlessly pursuing the layers of meaning and allusion in a wealth of Faulknerian words, Godden pays particular attention to the contradictions of perspective inherent in them that register the economic situation resulting from the mass emigration of a major portion of the black labor force from the South to the North during the 1940s and 1950s.

The book thus weds close reading and historicism as it explores The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable. Reading sharecropping as a form of neo-slavery in The Hamlet, Godden argues (against practically all of Faulkner criticism) that Flem is more a beneficiary of chance than a talented capitalist in his class struggles that expose him as a white-turned-black figure. Godden then illuminates previously overlooked interconnections among the sections of Go Down, Moses by unraveling the puns that reoccur throughout the book; for example, Godden draws a connection between Rider in “Pantaloon in Black” as a “buck” in the racist–sexual sense and the buck in “The Old People.” Especially revolutionary is Godden's identifying Percival Brownlee in the McCaslin ledgers as a gay figure central to those otherwise disparate documents. Perhaps most surprising of all is Godden's arguing (on the thinnest of evidence) that the corporal in A Fable is a Jew and that the novel conflates Jewishness and blackness to dramatize not wartime France but the loss of the black labor force in the South.

Godden's adroit maneuvers within the flesh of textuality are breathtaking, and the book offers a refreshing view of much-traveled scholarly ground. Its “historicism” may come across to readers as a bit stiff: the major flaw of the novel is that Godden's depiction of southern class and race structure is simply too reductive – the black–white binary is insufficient, and for Godden to offer an entire reading of The Hamlet without engaging poor whiteness as a distinct race–class category skews the reading significantly. That is not to say that his historical observations and conclusions have no relevance or are not in many ways true, but the strength of the book lies more in Godden's engagement with language than it does in its larger comments on southern history. It is in the close readings that the energies of this book lie and where the reader will find the most satisfaction and the furtherance of Faulkner scholarship.