Tobacco Road

Rating:
Summary: Sharecropper's opera
Review: "Tobacco Road" is about a family of Georgia sharecroppers who are so appallingly stupid, ignorant, and cruel, they can barely be regarded as human beings. Wretchedly poor, uneducated, living in a dilapidated house on a defunct cotton farm, unable to afford seed to grow crops, literally starving, the Lesters are both the cause and the product of their predicament. Erskine Caldwell does not attempt to make them heroes, villains, or clowns; he simply portrays them naturally, without ideological filters over the camera lens, and leaves the crusading against agrarian capitalist exploitation to John Steinbeck.

Jeeter Lester, the patriarch of this dirtwater dynasty, and his wife Ada have seventeen children, but the accuracy of that number is in question since he can't even remember all of their names. We get to meet only two of them: Ellie May, his harelipped daughter who, unmarried at age eighteen, is considered an old maid by local standards; and his teenage son Dude who has a promising future as a living scarecrow. There is also a creepy old woman who wanders around and hides behind trees, and this, we are told, is Jeeter's mother, although it is scary to think how she could be anybody's mother, even Jeeter's.

But the most frightening character is Sister Bessie, a noseless woman preacher with no particular denominational affiliation who just likes to thank God for everything. She (sort of) marries Dude and uses the money she inherited from her dead husband to buy a new Ford so they can drive around the county to preach. The car is, in fact, more deserving of sympathy than any character in the novel because of the brutal treatment it receives at the hands of the Lesters in just the first week of ownership -- a headlight is lost, a fender is crumpled, the front axle is bent, the paint is scratched, the engine is ruined for lack of oil, the upholstery is torn, and the spare tire is hocked. Dude's careless driving also causes two fatal accidents, but there is some consolation in the fact that one of the fatalities is Jeeter's mother.

Despite his Neanderthal mentality, Jeeter does have a conscience about certain things. It is out of an almost spiritual devotion to farming and not laziness that he refuses to earn a living by working in a cotton mill. He has always wanted but could never afford to get Ellie May's harelip fixed so she can attract a man. After stealing a sack of turnips from his son-in-law and endeavoring to keep them all for himself, he feels a brief pang of remorse. And both he and Ada are distinctly modern in their irrational fears about death; not about the dying itself, but about the body's postmortem condition -- Ada hopes to have a nice dress for the coffin, and Jeeter just wants to be assured that he won't be laid to rest anywhere rats could chew off his face like one did his father's.

However, for the most part there is no love nor humanity among the Lesters; they are animalistically selfish and insensitive to the extent that they resemble a pack of wolves more than a human family. In that sense, I enjoyed this novel because it's like a simpler cousin to Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" in subject and setting. I'm just thankful the edition I read wasn't illustrated.

Rating:
Summary: Sharecropper's opera
Review: "Tobacco Road" is about a family of Georgia sharecroppers who are so appallingly stupid, ignorant, and cruel, they can barely be regarded as human beings. Wretchedly poor, uneducated, living in a dilapidated house on a defunct cotton farm, unable to afford seed to grow crops, literally starving, the Lesters are both the cause and the product of their predicament. Erskine Caldwell does not attempt to make them heroes, villains, or clowns; he simply portrays them naturally, without ideological filters over the camera lens, and leaves the crusading against agrarian capitalist exploitation to John Steinbeck.

Jeeter Lester, the patriarch of this dirtwater dynasty, and his wife Ada have seventeen children, but the accuracy of that number is in question since he can't even remember all of their names. We get to meet only two of them: Ellie May, his harelipped daughter who, unmarried at age eighteen, is considered an old maid by local standards; and his teenage son Dude who has a promising future as a living scarecrow. There is also a creepy old woman who wanders around and hides behind trees, and this, we are told, is Jeeter's mother, although it is scary to think how she could be anybody's mother, even Jeeter's.

But the most frightening character is Sister Bessie, a noseless woman preacher with no particular denominational affiliation who just likes to thank God for everything. She (sort of) marries Dude and uses the money she inherited from her dead husband to buy a new Ford so they can drive around the county to preach. The car is, in fact, more deserving of sympathy than any character in the novel because of the brutal treatment it receives at the hands of the Lesters in just the first week of ownership -- a headlight is lost, a fender is crumpled, the front axle is bent, the paint is scratched, the engine is ruined for lack of oil, the upholstery is torn, and the spare tire is hocked. Dude's careless driving also causes two fatal accidents, but there is some consolation in the fact that one of the fatalities is Jeeter's mother.

Despite his Neanderthal mentality, Jeeter does have a conscience about certain things. It is out of an almost spiritual devotion to farming and not laziness that he refuses to earn a living by working in a cotton mill. He has always wanted but could never afford to get Ellie May's harelip fixed so she can attract a man. After stealing a sack of turnips from his son-in-law and endeavoring to keep them all for himself, he feels a brief pang of remorse. And both he and Ada are distinctly modern in their irrational fears about death; not about the dying itself, but about the body's postmortem condition -- Ada hopes to have a nice dress for the coffin, and Jeeter just wants to be assured that he won't be laid to rest anywhere rats could chew off his face like one did his father's.

However, for the most part there is no love nor humanity among the Lesters; they are animalistically selfish and insensitive to the extent that they resemble a pack of wolves more than a human family. In that sense, I enjoyed this novel because it's like a simpler cousin to Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" in subject and setting. I'm just thankful the edition I read wasn't illustrated.

Rating:
Summary: Southerners.
Review: A touching, moving drama about the perseverance of the human spirit and the brotherhood of man. Not!

Are Southerners fated to be so self destructive? Read "The Jungle" instead - there's something more sypathetic about people who actually try, but fail than about people who fail because they don't even try.

Rating:
Summary: A fitting end for ignorant, lazy and incestuous rubes.
Review: Although the book was not a total waste of time, as a native Southerner I was highly insulted. The psuedo intellectual New York trendsetters of 1932 probably thought this was typical behavior of Southerners. The Gore Vidal's of the world probably still believe it even today. What insults me the most is that the Modern Library, in their infinite wisdom, have included this book as one of the top 100 novels of the 20th Century and left off some truly magnificent novels about the Deep South like "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "Gone with the Wind". Come on Shelby Foote where were you when they voted?

Rating:
Summary: Is it even plausible?
Review: Boy, talk about 'moan and groan acres.' The people depicted in Caldwell's short novel are almost unbelievable not only in their ignorance but in their immorality. Women are treated as little more than commodities, while the elderly are totally ignored. The scavengers feeding on the Serengheti plains in Africa have nothing on these rapscallions. Can more selfish, self-serving characters even be imagined? Any comparison with the Joads in "Grapes of Wrath" is frivolous, it seems to me. The Joads are no less than moral giants when compared to the folks on "Tobacco Road." A fascinating read, but are these characters plausible enough to be taken seriously? Tobacco Road makes Dogpatch seem like a college town.

Rating:
Summary: Ouch! The Stupidity Hurts!
Review: Deep, deep in the South and deep, deep into the Depression comes this tale of unsurpassable ignorance, decrepit behavior, and misguided ambition in the lives of a remarkably poor, lamentably disgraceful Lester family.

The Lesters, starving tobacco "farmers" near Augusta, Georgia, develop a pitiful attempt to steal a bag of yams from their son-in-law, Lov. From there, the story spirals down into poor and impoverished lives, including the young son, Dude, who marries the "hussy" preacher, and Besse, the woman who was born without a nose. Their wild adventure, travelling into Augusta to try and sell "blackjack," a cheap scrap wood, fails, as they are taken advantage of and return to their farm with much less than what they started out with. (On the drive to the city in their new Model-T, bought with Bessie's insurance settlement, Dude's neglegent driving kills an African-American on the side of the road, for which they have no more remorse than if someone had stepped on an ant!)

This novel is brutally honest, depressing in its depictions of a mongrel family. It is the truth with any tailoring, the crude truth.

Rating:
Summary: a brooding black comedy on being poor
Review: Erskine Caldwell has more in common with James M. Cain than John Steinbeck and this, by far his most famous book (he wrote an awful lot of them) is a vastly entertaining pulp novel about the worst of the wretched.

Things are so bad for this family that it has surpassed the epic tragedy of the under-privilaged 'farmer class' of the Depression and into the deserving squalor of hell reserved for the lazy, the ignorant and the spiteful. The story begins with a well-rounded plot to steal a bag of turnips from a man everyone is trying to convince to marry one of the daughters--his much younger cousin.

Things do not improve and you'll find yourself growing to enjoy the increasing absurdity of the miserable things that happen, and enlightened by the consistant hopes and failures of each of the many characters.

Much better than I'd expected, I blazed through it in a workday and a half, just prior to taking a trip I had planned to read this book en route to.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly enjoyable reading
Review: Excellent story of an unfortunate family in the hard old days of the rural South in America.

I felt very sorry for the poor old grandmother who was treated just like the dirt and rubbish that was her environment.

I think Caldwells books are great reading and I have just ordered "Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell" so I can catch up on some of the ones I don't have in my library.

This book is thoroughly recommended although I would think that most fans of Caldwell would have already ready it.

Rating:
Summary: Makes Zola look cheerful!
Review: Geez! Just finished my original 1932 hardbound edition from the library book sale -- my first Caldwell book -- and feel blessed above all men compared to the characters in what I just read.

This book makes the Li'l Abner gang look like the Vanderbilts. You've got a whole book based on a family who subsists off stolen turnips, snuff and boiled roots, with no money, no family allegiances (despite living like worms in a couple of beds in a shingle shack propped up on rocks), but somehow you come to love them, with their hairlips and inbred idiocy and more.

Imagine the most isolated and ignorant hillbilly characters you know (I mentioned Li'l Abner, but maybe someone from Deliverance or Flannery O'Connor or Faulkner). You could put a Faulknerian idiot man-child up against this crew as a role model.

Man, what a harsh book. It's kind of repetitive (a lot of times I thought I had already read a paragraph, but it was just the same thing being restated -- usually the parts about Jeeter wanting to get his daughter's hairlip "sewed up" or plant something in his wasted fields)-- I think the repetition may have been deliberate, in order to drive home the tiny hopeless world Jeeter and the clan live in. In any case, the book is short enough to wonder about this and still power though to the end without any draining literary analysis.

Before Caldwell, I thought Emile Zola was the best at spinning a story that started off bad for all the characters and got progessively worse (oh, and Frank Norris), but this breaks the record. I'll be reading more by this guy wherever I can find them. There's something dirtily satisfying about reading such books, sort of a literary slumming alternative to trash TV.

I don't know if this was literature or not, or if there is any factual basis for this -- but that hasn't stopped me before.

Rating:
Summary: Can people really be that Stupid???
Review: I love how they treat the new car. Hillariously stupi