THIS, CALDWELL’S TWENTY-THIRD PUBLISHED VOLUME, is almost impossible to review, largely, I suspect, because it is almost impossible to take it seriously. One wonders why it was done at all. Certainly there is nothing in the book which would not justify the suspicion that Mr. Caldwell was concerned with nothing more momentous than getting rid of some of the paper he had lying about the house, resurrecting several of the tired types on which he first made his reputation, and (incidentally) making a few dollars on the deal.
The story, such as it is, is laid, predictably, in the South, and to no one’s surprise it concerns some poor whites struggling to get along. We have the blowsy, aging prostitute, Molly; her carelessly spawned daughter, Lilly, sixteen, and growing swiftly into a willowy and blindly attractive aphrodisiac; a notably uninspired Jeeter Lester type, here named Jethro; a minister and his sex-starved wife; sex, of course, overlaid with squalor and shot through with what here becomes a curiously revolting humor and a snobbish kind of love. For a story line we have the recently widowed Molly’s attempt to find a man and to make money and keep Lilly pure until she finds a good husband for her. Hoping, perhaps, to have this described as a tragicomedy, Mr. Caldwell thwarts his characters at every turn. The story stops where it began and in the same key. Lilly, to be sure, is no longer a virgin, but no one expected that she would be.
Still, this is a curious book; curious because of its effortless tone and absolute emptiness. Mr. Caldwell, it would appear, knows these people so well that he is no longer even interested in them. He sets them up and they strut their stuff and go back into darkness until it is time for another book. Here, the sure hand of Mr. Caldwell is everywhere apparent. He has not written a single sloppy sentence (nor a single interesting one) nor created (within his own familiar framework) a single unlikely character. This must be fun for Mr. Caldwell, and there is no reason why it cannot go on forever.
It is something of a pity, though. Mr. Caldwell’s gifts may never have been profound, but he was once—as in God’s Little Acre and in some of the short stories, notably “Kneel to the Rising Sun,” and in the honest, well-controlled rage pervading You Have Seen Their Faces—far more valid, far more concerned with human beings and the terrible circumstances of their lives. Mr. Caldwell’s strength lay in his skill as a storyteller, which—and almost regrettably—he has not lost; his concern with and knowledge of one of the unlovelier aspects of the Southern scene, which has become mechanical; and his passion, which to all evidence has died. His career is almost a study in the slow conquest of immobility. Unless we hear from him again in accents more individual, we can leave his bones for that literary historian of another day who may perhaps define and isolate that virus in our organism which has thus far proved so deadly to the growth of our literature in general and our writers in particular.
(1947)