What is most striking about this Erskine Caldwell novel are its shifts in tone. From a comic beginning in which a stubborn Georgia farmer ruins his fields to dig for gold, the story moves to South Carolina, where a kind of In Dubious Battle scenario plays out at a textile mill. (Mill workers are colorfully disparaged as "lint-heads" by some.) Then comes a Cain and Abel flourish, complete with deep philosophizing by the farmer, Ty Ty Walden. This is not even mentioning the lust that is threaded through the narrative, or the albino, or the black sharecroppers who seem to know everything. I have rarely encountered a more compelling and at the same time dizzying work.
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