Georgia Boy
by Erskine Caldwell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Erskine CaldwellForeword: Roy Blount Jr.
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-08-01
ISBN: 0820317365
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Book Reviews of Georgia Boy
Book Review: "Falling Out Over A Little Thing Like Kinship"
Summary: 5 Stars
Equal parts burlesque, farce, and tall tale, Erskine Caldwell's interrelated short story collection Georgia Boy (1943) finds its author near the peak of his writing talent. Young William Stroup, the observant only child of a poor Georgia family, narrates the fourteen stories. While the endless string of shenanigans William reports clearly demonstrate his father Morris' stupidity, sloth, and immorality, objective William never offers an opinion on his father's behavior. As the stories progress, it becomes clear that while he mildly sympathizes with his hardworking, frustrated, and put-upon mother, William actually admires his father's outrageous breaches of acceptable behavior.
Like Jeeter Lester of Tobacco Road (1931) and Ty Ty Walden of God's Little Acre (1933) before him, Morris Stroup is a daydreamer constantly on the lookout for pie in the sky and any shortcut to prosperity, no matter how absurd, outlandish, or illegal.
In fact, the Stroups stand somewhere between the Lesters and the Waldens in terms of socialization; while they are not as backward, uneducated, and dispossessed as the poorest-of-the-poor-Lesters, the Stroups lack the Walden's daring-do, ingenuity, marginal prosperity, and relatively strong interrelationships. Like the Lesters, the Stroups live in a house divided: since the extraverted Morris is constantly misbehaving on a grand scale, William's mother ("Ma") finds it necessary to constantly be on her guard against her husband's latest transgression. One of the book's hilarious running jokes is Ma telling William to "go in the house right this instant and shut the doors and pull down the window shades" so she can confront Morris alone with his latest deception, chase him with a broom, or throw any object available in his direction. Like most men and teenage boys in Caldwell's fiction, Morris thinks with his genitals and his stomach first.
When Ma is not suffering due to Morris's behavior, Handsome Brown, the black "yard boy," is. Handsome lives in a shed on the Morris property and receives only food and occasional secondhand clothing for his work. Though Handsome is thrown from a second-story roof into a deep well, attacked for hours by a flock of woodpeckers, and hit repeatedly in the face with baseballs due to Morris's wild machinations, Handsome also shows far more common and moral sense than any other character in the book. Handsome, who has a slight lazy streak of his own, also does most of the work around the house, while Morris "hasn't done an honest day's work in ten years." While Morris is clearly a fool in every sense, Handsome is only a fool in Morris's unthinking opinion: Morris unquestioningly considers Handsome a lesser being strictly on the basis of his race.
But Morris is an archetypal fool extraordinaire, ridiculously bringing one avoidable disaster after another upon his head. A pure fool, Morris is incapable of learning from his mistakes or perceiving his own culpability, lacks foresight entirely, and regardless of the outcome of his actions, still manages to have a high opinion of himself as a `hail-fellow-well-met,' kind, light-hearted individual.
The stories of Georgia Boy abound with loaded, riotous situations, most of which have been precipitated by Morris. The Stroup home is invaded by caravans of marauding gypsies; the roof of their two-story house becomes home to a family of goats; Morris discovers that a young widow likes having her toes tickled with a chicken feather; Ma discovers her precious ribbon-bound love letters and the church's new hymnals have disappeared; Morris decides to become the town's dog catcher; Handsome decides to run off to work for the circus; Morris decides to purchase and bright yellow and green necktie he can't afford and has no use for; Morris decides his neighbors have less use for their own property than he does; Ma decides Morris's cock fighting days have to come to an end.
As in his other early fiction, Caldwell excels at characterization, even while his men, women, and children tend to run to type. Caldwell had a genius for comedy that stretches the boundaries of probability without ever going too far. Like a fourteen-story illustration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's statement that "there's no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind," Georgia Boy is a warm, touching, and uproarious examination of the large and small foibles of man.
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