Tobacco Road (Bookcassette(r) Edition)

Rating:
Summary: What Is This, Exactly?
Review: If you were to ask me if I liked "Tobacco Road," my answer would be "I guess so.....I think."

It's hard to decide whether or not I liked this book because it's hard to decide what exactly this book is. It's a wisp of a thing really, about 150 pages of nothing happening. Yet it's not boring. There are parts of it that I found funny, but they are so grotesque that I'm not sure they're supposed to be funny. I wanted to sympathize with these poor, pathetic people living like animals, yet I didn't, because they so frustratingly refuse to do anything to help themselves.

Erskine Caldwell's story involves a couple of days in the life of a dismally poor one-time sharecropper and those members of his family who haven't yet left home, scraping a living out of the dust in Depression-era Georgia. Like I said, not a lot happens in the way of plot until the hurried ending, which feels tacked on by Caldwell at the last minute as if to justify to his readers why they spent their time reading his book.

If you thought the Joads of "The Grapes of Wrath" had it bad, wait until you get a load of the Lesters. This family has none of the dignity displayed by Steinbeck's characters, and it's this difference that ultimately makes the Lesters not worth caring about. Jeeter, the family's patriarch, stubborly refuses to leave his land, even though other poor families are finding opportunities and means for providing for their own families in the nearby mill towns. Jeeter justifies his refusal to leave by taking on a martyred air and feigning a noble attachment to the land, but in reality he's victim to an intensely lazy malaise that will prevent him from ever doing anything to help himself. He thinks the children who have left home never to return or even communicate with their parents have acted selfishly and callously (mostly because they refuse to send money home), but who can blame them? I wouldn't ever return home either.

I think this book is supposed to be funny; the back cover of the book compares Caldwell to Mark Twain. However, if that's the case, then this book borders on the appalling. Caldwell's tone throughout is snide and nasty--he invites us to laugh at the Lesters and their stupidity. And if we're supposed to be laughing, then one wonders what Caldwell's purpose was in writing this. If we're meant to simply read this book as a comedy, then I'm repelled at the pointlessness of the whole enterprise. I don't truly believe this was Caldwell's sole purpose, yet the book also fails as an indictment of the social institutions responsible for reducing families to this state of destitution.

"Tobacco Road" falls into that category of books that you might as well read, since it's held in high esteem by the literary establishment and will take virtually no time to finish. I think you'll be moderately entertained, but I also wouldn't be surprised if you have the the urge to scratch your head when it's all over and wonder what in the world you just sat through.

Rating:
Summary: Downe On The Farm
Review: Tobacco Road documents the last days in the lives of Jeeter and Ada Lester, poverty-stricken and permanently befuddled sharecroppers living in rural Georgia during the Great Depression. Both a comedy and a tragedy, the book, almost a folk carnival of sorts, is hilarious and strangely uplifting from beginning to end. The tragic element, barely discernable but slowly advancing throughout the course of the book, strikes sharply and rapidly at the characters and the reader in quick lunges before vanishing again beneath the brilliant comic surface.

The novel has a archetypal framework: Patriarch Jeeter, dispossessed of his ancestral land, upon which nothing will now grow but broom sedge and scrub oak, perpetually dreams of bringing his dead and depleted soil to new life. While musing on his farm's infertility and future, and when not lusting after the women around him, Jeeter--father of twelve--is simultaneously preoccupied with ending his own ability to reproduce via self-castration. Like the Hanged Man of the Tarot, habitually procrastinating Jeeter is continually hamstrung and locked in the stupefying moment.

Caldwell is particularly cruel in drawing his female characters: simple-minded and otherwise beautiful daughter Ellie May has a disfiguring harelip; man-crazy, self-appointed preacher Bessie has a good figure but no nose (the other characters are fascinated with trying to see how far down her open-holed nostrils they can peer), the unnamed, silent grandmother is starved out by the other family members who will no longer acknowledge her; struggling, hungry and forward-looking wife Ada, who has not always been faithful, dreams only of having a dress of correct length and current style to be buried in; and twelve year-old child bride Pearl has lost the will to speak and sleeps on a pallet on the floor to avoid her adult husband's sexual advances. In contrast, Jeeter and handsome teenage son Dude are merely imbecilic, gullible, and grossly but unknowingly selfish.

All of the characters are God-fearing and largely well-intentioned towards one another, though uneducated and of extremely limited consciousness. Therefore, they are guiltless of malice if not of responsibility. In a scene which may offend some of today's readers, newlyweds Dude and Bessie accidently kill a black man and think nothing of it. But this blank, spontaneous indifference to reality and the reality of other people is what makes the book funny. The ancient grandmother meets a painful and grueling death through another careless accident with the car; Jeeter rudely discusses Ellie May's disfigurement with her without the slightest awareness of her emotional reaction; Bessie, perpetually in heat, nearly rapes unwilling, unresponsive, 16 year-old Dude; car salesmen gather to stare down Bessie's nostril holes and insult her; Jeeter attacks his son-in-law and steals the bag of turnips he walked has seven miles to buy; Ellie May masturbates openly in the front yard; the whole family gathers, tribe-like, to watch Dude and Bessie make awkward love on their wedding day; then communally destroy a new (and totem-like symbol of the modern, productive, urbanized world they will never be a part of) automobile within a few days due to recklessness and the family curse of being unable to respect and maintain anything.

Like many of the characters in Muriel Spark's novels, the cast of Tobacco Road are only vaguely aware, if aware at all, of themselves as moral, spiritual or ethical beings, despite the flimsy religious trappings around them. This lack of moral awareness "and the comedy that arises from it" is what fuels Tobacco Road. Caldwell has written the lightest of black comedies, and it is to his credit that he is capable of making the reader embrace and enjoy these occasionally vigorous lost souls, even as the reader senses there will be only grief ahead for all.

The universal success of Tobacco Road in 1932 (the novel was made into a long-running Broadway play, and a toned-down John Ford film) gave new, 20th-Century life to the country bumpkin genre, which in turn gave birth to the Ma And Pa Kettle films, the Li'l Abner comic strip, some of Tennessee William's short stories and plays, and classic American television series the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Petticoat Junction.

Despite the many ways in which sexual intentions go awry in the book, it has a natural, healthy approach to sexuality, as did Caldwell's next novel, God's Little Acre. In our age of political correctness and sexual lockdown, the book's vibrant, sexuality-as-a-given attitude is stirring.

Some Southerners, at the time of its publication and continuing through to the present, have objected to the book as an indictment of Southern culture and an insult to its people. This charge is groundless, as the book is clearly a soulful high comedy, and its characters strictly caricatures, which could easily be converted into present-day, inner-city poor, Californian migrant workers, Alaskan trappers, or a suburban blue-collar family with the same results, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or age. Ultimately, Tobacco Road is a novel which seductively illuminates and instructs while it seamlessly entertains.

Hats off to the University of Georgia Press for courageously rescuing Caldwell from oblivion, understanding his work in context, and bringing the best of his work to the public in these handsome volumes.

Rating:
Summary: Tobacco Road
Review: Written in a plainative style reminisicent of Hemingway, Caldwell does a fasinating job creating his characters who are all concerned only with themselves and seem to disregard the rest of their family because they only get in the way of their own individual happiness. The main focus of the story is on Jeeter Lester who is the father of the family living on an old piece of land that use to be part of his grandfathers successful tobacco plantation. The Lester family is currently poor and the Lesters must beg or steal to get a hold of any food. Their complete disregard for others can be shown through numerous events throughout the novel, such as Jeeter carelessly stealing a croker sack full of turnips from his son-in-law and running off and eating nearly the entire sack before returning to give the remains to his starving family. When reading this book it seemed to have the same feel as The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, but notably is more explicit which at times had me gasping. One instance of this is when Jeeter's mother is run over by a car and the family seems to pay no attention whatsoever to her laying dying in their front yard. Definately recommended read as it portrays an insight into a poor farming family of the 1930s coping with poverty, though perhaps a little twisted at times. But the twists and turns make it all the more enjoyable a read and I look forward to reading more by Erskine Caldwell in the future.