Exactly how steamy is this story?
R
This book has one sex scene (5.4.197-199), but you'll miss the steamy part if you blink. The act gets lost somewhere between the newlywed couple drama and the hundreds-of-words-long sentences. Faulkner seems to have made it deliberately hard to figure out what is actually going on.
Except for that one scene, for all the babies being born in this book, it remains squarely in PG-13 territory for the most part.
So why do we give it an R rating? Well, it all goes back to old Carothers, who has sexual relations with his own daughter Tomey and ends up having a son, Turl/Terrel, from her. None of the stories directly depict this relationship, but the fact that incest is always lurking in the background and is always referred to gives the novel an R from us. And all the racial epithets don't help, either. We'd keep this out of the hands of the young'uns.