In twenty-eight years of writing, Erskine Caldwell has published the impressive total of thirty-two books (four of these in collaboration with Margaret Bourke-White). His best short stories have been collected in two additional volumes and his novels have been taken apart, divested of their more serious sections, and re-assembled as an omnibus volume of humor. But sheer productivity has seldom been kind to the reputations of American novelists, and Caldwell, more than most, is a victim of his own success. His latest, and thirty-third book, Certain Women, is an example not only of an obvious decline in talent but of a related inability to find a social focus for his work.

Partly, this is a result of circumstance. The South of God's little Acre, Tobacco Road and Kneel to the Rising Sun—three books that have made Caldwell one of our most popular authors abroad—is passing. The "poor whites" of the tobacco country are no longer quite so poor, nor is the Negro entirely at the mercy of an oppressive rural economy. The violence of Caldwell's stories, the explicit sexual episodes, are staple ingredients in American fiction, so that what was a subject for censorship twenty-five years ago is passed off today with hardly a shrug.

Moreover, he suffers from the complacency brought on by good times. It was Caldwell's fortune to share with James T. Farrell, Steinbeck, Dos Passos and (to a lesser extent) William Faulkner the public's indignation at conditions that prevailed during the Depression. Alone of this group, Caldwell comes closest to being a folk writer, with a folk writer's simplification of character and incident. And yet, in contrast to the "quaint," frequently sentimentalized mountain people who obtained in the American novel prior to 1929, he gave us a pitiless and yet bizarrely comic picture of an isolated, backward environment.

It was Caldwell's gift to make us angry at the same time that he made us laugh, to transform the tail end of the social pecking order, with its victimization by the top, into something irrational and absurd. In this connection, probably the most notable influence on his work is Uncle Tom's Cabin—one of the standard characters in a Caldwell book is an unreconstructed Simon Legree, in whose evil nature sex has been substituted for slavery—and it can be said that he kept the theme of "life among the lowly" alive simply by making it funny.

Caldwell's troubles began when he attempted to inject sophistication into his stories—or at least more sophistication than could be found along tobacco road. Certain Women belongs with the group of latter-day novels and short stories that have been moved out of the share-cropper's fields and into town. In making this transition (and possibly in making money), Caldwell seems to have lost the indignation that once accounted for such novels as Trouble in July and the fine documentary You Have Seen Their Faces.

His new book is a collection of seven long stories, unified by a common locale (the town of Claremore) and the social desuetude of its heroines, who whether they Love men or hate them are always designing. On the one hand there's Nancy, who says: "I'll never get married again; I've made up my mind about that once and for all. I tolerate men now, and I have dates with them once in a while, but I'll never live with one again. I've found out that they're not my kind. . . ." On the other hand, there's Selma: "When she came to Claremore, Selma had only one purpose in mind. She was determined to be married as soon as possible—and not later than the Christmas holidays if she had her way—in order to be able to give up teaching for the remainder of her life."

With an embarrassing predictability, these women suffer the effects of Simon Legreeism. Some have fathers intent on getting them off the payroll; some are ordinary mortals with the seven-year itch; one is an ex-prostitute who contrives to get married to a minister; another is a schoolteacher who loses her fiance to the proprietor of the rooming house where she lives. In all cases the women are cuckolded, sometimes quite brutally, and Simon goes unpunished.

The best that can be said for these stories is that they illustrate Caldwell's talent for portraying evil humorously. But without a purpose, devoid, even, of a good regional setting, they lack conviction. They entertain on the level of the comic strip. One feels that this book will find its best market in paper covers, for Caldwell, who has lost his critical followers, still reaches the so-called mass audience—ironically, since he is himself working largely in a vacuum.