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: 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: An important book
Review: I tried reading Tobacco Road several times in the past, but could never get past the first few pages. Now, I finally have read the whole thing, and I'm glad I did. This book could be tucked, whole, into the Canterbury Tales: it would fit very well there.

If you don't read much, but thought the ATM machine theft sub-plot in the 2002 Ice Cube movie "Barbershop" was hysterical, this whole book is a story like that-- hairbrained ideas spinning horribly out of control. It's really funny on the top, but sad and inevitable underneath.

Caldwell breaks with the silliness right in the middle of the book, inserting a chapter that explains the forces that have brought his characters to this particular brink. It's a bit of a change-up, so I suspect many readers skim over it. But the true story, the devastating cultural and economic shifts that occured as the region turned from tobacco to cotton and from agriculture to manufacture is a key part of understanding the South. And if you want to understand and feel hopeful about the future of the rural, agricultural, and disease-stricken Third World, in my opinion, you'd probably better work hard at understanding the emergence of this American region.

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: 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: Tobacco Road
Review: In Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell tells the humorous yet incredibly detestable tale of an extremely poor southern family during the Great Depression. Their amazingly ignorant, destructive, and immoral behavior is almost painful to read about at times but is somehow strangely amusing.

The story begins with Jeeter Lester stealing a sack of turnips from his son-in-law who has walked all day to buy them. After hearing the description of the family's living conditions, however, the reader almost feels he is justified in taking them to feed his starving children, wife, and mother. Any sympathy quickly vanishes when Jeeter runs off into the woods to stuff himself with turnips before he returns to give the little that is left to his family. It should come as no surprise that nearly all of his children ran away from home as soon as they could and never return home to visit. One of his two children that is still at home when the book begins is Dude, Jeeter's sixteen-year-old son. Soon Dude gets married to a traveling preacher woman named Bessie who was born without a nose. Bessie lures Dude into the marriage with the promise of a new car for Dude despite the fact that they are twenty-five years apart in age. After running over and killing a black man, an event which does not bother any of the Lesters, and other such calamities, the car is quickly rendered into a piece of junk by the destructive hands of Dude and Jeeter. When Bessie complains about their rough treatment of the car, Jeeter kicks her off his land and starts hitting her with sticks. In her rush to get away, Bessie runs over Jeeter's mother, but she does not even stop to see if she is alright. The amazing thing is that Jeeter does not go check on her either, and his mother suffers a slow, agonizing death as she attempts to crawl to the house.

The characters in the book are not developed much beyond the fact that they are incredibly ignorant and immoral, but the reader gets the impression that that is because there is really not much more to the Lester family than those qualities. Any potential redeeming qualities are quickly obscured by a flood of more and more horrendous characteristics. An example of this is Jeeter's love of the land, which could be seen as a positive attribute. Quickly, however, the reader realizes that this love of the land is the root of the Lesters' poverty, because Jeeter cannot afford seeds to plant but will not leave the land to work in the city. This also serves to display the theme of the book which is man's often irrational refusal to accept changes in life.

The style of the book, although plain, contains very well written dialog and the setting is excellently portrayed as well. If there is one problem in the book, it is the extremity to which the depravity of the characters is taken. This can make it nearly impossible to relate to or sympathize with the characters in any way. Although this can detract slightly from the story, overall the book was very entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: It Apparently Took One To Describe One
Review: This entertaining story is noteworthy because (among other attributes) it so perfectly nails the defeatist, do-nothing psyche of someone who believes there can be no reward from personal industry -- the Jeter Lesters of the world who continually blame someone or something else for their problems, while constantly wishing the old captain would show up and give them some snuff. It's ironic that Caldwell could so accurately describe the logical product of communism, the Jeter Lester family, while being a leftist himself. Was he proud of their lifestyle, or what?

Rating:
Summary: A trashy novel about trashy people.
Review: This is one of those novels that college professors value so highly. Erskin Caldwell was an expert at using coloquialisms and minimalist style to create word pictures that are hard to get out of your mind. He was a gifted southern writer who achieved much acclaim everywhere but in his native South. In the middle and south Georgia counties around Wrens, GA, the area depicted in TOBACCO ROAD, Caldwell's is a name that is still not mentioned in polite company.

As far as representing depression era Southern reality TOBACCO ROAD was no more true to life in 1933 than it would be today. The Lester Family never existed and people in the rural South didn't live as the novel depicts them, at least no one I know did. Novels like this one and GOD'S LITTLE ACRE, also by Caldwell, reenforced a prejudiced opinion of this area of the country that is still held by many. We Southerners have been trying to correct this erroneous perception ever since.

The area around Augusta, GA is nothing like that which is depicted in Caldwell's novel. It never was. I know. I live there.

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: funny and bizarre
Review: Tobacco Road was a skillfully written novel that acurately protrayed suffering during the Great Depression. It showed how selfish people become when they are fighting to survive. An obvious example of this fact is Old Mother Lester. Everyone was waiting, even hoping, for her to die so they could have more food and not have to think of her anymore. When Dude backed the car into her, no one was even concerned. This novel really showed how cruel the world is sometimes.