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Rating: I stumbled upon this author almost by chance, browsing through the shelves to try to satiate the hunger for books that evening, I remember well, was gnawing at my stomach like ivy climbing a wall; and now, after having digested his most important work, which according to many isn't even his best, I am happy. Impatient, I rub my hands in the exact same way a BP boss would when notified of the discovery of a new oil field in peaceful international waters. Because it is now certain that in the coming months my eyes will mercilessly drill through the rich bibliography of Erskine Caldwell: his writing, in fact, perfectly suits my tastes for its ability to be concise, free from even the slightest hint of rhetoric, incisive, smooth and satisfying to the point of deserving multiple readings in quick succession.
In the good old days, the land was cultivated and nothing more could be asked for than a little seed, a mountain of guano to spread laboriously under the sun, and the mercy of the climate. Those family lands, once endless, like water in a tub when you pull the plug, and now Jeeter, just two generations later, is ending his life with nothing in hand but an irreparably worn-out old car tire. The rural world has changed forever, but he refuses to acknowledge it. He doesn’t give a damn about the fact that industry has emptied the countryside, that farming the land the old way is no longer profitable, that the creditors from whom financing for the harvest could be sought have gone to the city and aren't coming back.
The first impact is melancholic: one almost feels compassion in the careful depiction of this devastated family unable to keep up with the times and seemingly condemned to starve while praying for the forgiveness of their sins. But that initial patina disappears in a flash and soon a pack of hyenas emerges, led by a master who lives in complete sloth, endlessly procrastinating every decision. Tomorrow, tomorrow, always tomorrow, and that field has been burning for seven years and never gets plowed. Jeeter is so lazy that if he falls, damn it, he stays on the ground for an hour before reluctantly getting up, once it’s clear that God, not even this time, will lift him; he waits for the world to revert and, in the meantime, lives by subterfuge, shamelessly stealing from others, selling his eleven-year-old daughters to the highest bidder.
But the cursing, the violence, the rotten sex, and the disproportionate animalistic selfishness of every character are trivial compared to the icy indifference that pervades every single catastrophic event descending upon the Lester family (see description of the grandmother's character). The passive acceptance, that faint clinging to a God and the illusions of an impossible future while asking for redemption with blasphemy, almost tastes tragi-comic in Caldwell's sublime adaptation. Because even those small glimmers of hope found in the novel get irreparably soiled with dust and guano just like the body of the new car. Because the Lesters really have the ability to turn everything into shit and suffering; and it's not the result of a sorcerer's curse, but an ability acquired slowly, like the skilled craft of an artisan, because being such bastards, lowly, and repulsive requires strict and constant training.
It is no surprise that Caldwell pissed off a good number of people in the Southern United States: books like this, with a writing style resembling sandpaper in its realism, captured the worst face of the South in the post-World War I era: ignorant and poor capable of dehumanizing the lives of who knows how many Lester families.
And if in a few months you can say that these lines have encouraged you to discover an excellent author, don't thank me with useless stars, you know how much I care! Instead, spend an hour pressing the keys to let me discover a great unknown book. I’ll be grateful to you.
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