Mosquitoes (novel)

Mosquitoes

First edition cover
Author	William Faulkner
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Boni & Liveright, Inc.
Publication date	1927
Pages	349 pages

Mosquitoes is a satiric novel by the American author William Faulkner. The book was first published in 1927 by the New York-based publishing house Boni & Liveright and is the author’s second novel. Sources conflict regarding whether Faulkner wrote Mosquitoes during his time living in Paris, beginning in 1925 or in Pascagoula, Mississippi in the summer of 1926. It is, however, widely agreed upon that not only its setting, but also its content clearly reference Faulkner’s personal involvement in the New Orleans creative community where he spent time before moving to France.

The city of New Orleans and a yacht on Lake Pontchartrain are the two primary settings for the novel. Beginning and ending in the city, the story follows a diverse cast of artists, aesthetes, and adolescents as they embark on a four-day excursion aboard the motorized yacht, the Nausikaa, owned by a wealthy patron of the arts.

The novel is organized into six sections: a prologue which introduces the characters, four body sections each of which documents a day of the yacht trip hour-by-hour, and an epilogue which returns the characters, changed or unchanged, to their lives off the boat.

Mosquitoes opens in the apartment of one of the story’s main characters, a reserved and dedicated sculptor named Gordon. Ernest Talliaferro, a friend of the artist, joins him in the apartment, watching intently as the Gordon chisels away at a sculpture. Talliaferro engages the sculptor in a largely one-sided ‘conversation’ about his abilities with women. The artist works around the chatty Talliaferro, indifferently agreeing with every claim and question, yet declines the offer to attend an evidently aforementioned boat trip hosted by the wealthy Mrs. Maurier.

Leaving the apartment to get a bottle of milk for Gordon, he meets Mrs. Maurier, the hostess of the upcoming yachting trip, who is accompanied by her niece, Pat. A quick return to Gordon’s apartment follows where Mrs. Maurier personally extends the offer for him to join the yachting excursion. Though Gordon maintains a distant and uninterested aura, it becomes evident through the stream-of-consciousness passages that follow that he is at odds with himself over his sudden attraction to Pat that changes his mind about the trip.

When Talliaferro takes leave of Gordon and the women, his path through the city and the path’s of other characters that diverge in his wake serve to introduce the multifaceted New Orleans artistic community around which the plot focuses. At a dinner that follows, Talliaferro’s visit with Gordon, the conversations about art that ensue as well as the sexual tensions that are hinted at in the interactions of Talliaferro, Julius Kaufmann, and Dawson Fairchild set the stage for the interactions and themes that come to typify rest of the novel.