Trouble in July (Brown Thrasher Books)
by Erskine Caldwell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Erskine CaldwellForeword: Bryant Simon
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-03-01
ISBN: 0820321052
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Book Reviews of Trouble in July (Brown Thrasher Books)
Book Review: "Murder As A Kind Of Carnival"
Summary: 2 Stars
Written after the enormous successes of Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933) and the critical and popular failure of Journeyman (1935), Erskine Caldwell's Trouble In July (1940) is an earnest but listless novel which addresses the lynching of Negroes in the Deep South. Taking place during the period in which it was written, the novel is neither a black comedy burlesque like Tobacco Road nor an example of the more private, pseudo-surrealist fiction Caldwell produced with Journeyman or some of his many short stories of the era.
Instead, Trouble in July attempts and fails to achieve a finely poised balance between realistic fiction and a kind of Keystone Cops comedy. But pointed exaggeration at every level was Caldwell's forte, and the novel, which was written with difficulty over a period of several years, is redundant, flat, predictable, and anticlimactic, despite the piling up of several reoccurring cinematic plot devices, such as the worst possible person walking in the door or phoning at the absolute worst time. In Chapter Six, heavily put-upon sheriff and protagonist Jeff McCurtain conceives a plan to escape his duties by inventing a threatening posse of masked bandits, only to find himself held at gunpoint by an identical gang in reality.
Trouble In July features several politicians who are only concerned that the lynching, which they see as inevitable and acceptable as long as it reflects "the will of the people," not turn public opinion against them, a sheriff's deputy whose great joy in life is "hunting possums between midnight and dawn and tracking down runaway Negroes at every opportunity," vigilante gangs for whom the routine killing of blacks is the umbrella answer to most of life's problems, a religious zealot who is outraged that bibles depicting Christ as a black man are circulating in the Negro community, a signature-gathering campaign to "send all the Negroes to the country of Africa without delay," a black character, the object of the lynching, who is little more than a wide-and-wild eyed caricature, and, among other Caldwell stock characters, a fifteen year old uneducated white girl with an inordinate appetite for sex and attention.
God's Little Acre used a similar formula, but that novel, Caldwell's best, was fraught with tension and conflict, and, as a result, contains one of the most suspenseful and poignant climaxes in all of American literature. Perhaps due to the seriousness of its subject, Caldwell's creative exposition in Trouble in July is cautious to the point of being half hearted, and as a result, the novel, which is never quite believable on any level, creeps and crawls tentatively towards its conclusion rather than galloping confidently ahead.
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