[In the following excerpt, Korges discusses The Sacrilege of Alan Kent, considering it essential to understanding "Caldwell's full range and his place in contemporary literature. "]

One section (II: 8) sounds like the beginning of a film by Ingmar Bergman: "I lived for a while in a room with two girls. Neither of them could speak English nor understand it, and I never knew what they were talking about." That rich scene is left in this epiphanal form, as in Hemingway's figure of a short story as an iceberg, only a small amount actually showing. In Caldwell's notations, most of each story is left unstated. Occasionally sections sound like the "deep images" of Robert Bly, James Wright, and other members of the "Sixties" group, as in II: 11: "Once the sun was so hot a bird came down and walked beside me in my shadow." At the end of Part II, the narrator returns to his hometown, but the place is inhabited by strangers except for a girl whose "breast was bursting like a blossom in the warm sunshine."

Part III follows the central character through a winter journey and various odd jobs, including a carnival in which Caldwell, with a great imaginative stroke, has the fortuneteller go crazy. Repeatedly the images lie in one's mind and are suddenly transformed—as in the scene in which the central character sees a girl so beautiful that the sight of her beauty scars his eyes (III: 8). One recalls a later work, James Dickey's remarkable poem on faces seen once only. The section contains a good deal of fine ribald humor which foreshadows later plot devices. In III: 17 an employer keeps Negro girls for his satisfaction, until one girl defeats him: "The man brought another Negro girl to the house but she had greased her body with lard and he could not hold her." That is the essence, the reader being left to add the usual details of a great tall story in the manner of Twain or Faulkner—the Negro girl lowering herself to the status of greased pig to maintain her higher conception of herself. But that is part of the submerged iceberg, part of the unspoken available.

The book is strange, at times brilliant. Caldwell would not again use this method, except in passages of description in the novels and in pointed details in the essays, as when in an essay in Some American People he places an action in perspective by syntactical means: the scene is North Dakota, the time is August 1934, the action is "The last Roundup" in which the federal government in two days cleared the Badlands of ten thousand head of cattle, shipping them to pastures not destroyed by drouth: "The last great roundup is over, the bones of the culls that fell by the wayside have been picked clean, and the painted canyons of the Badlands are unchanged." The Sacrilege of Alan Kent is one of the books we must look to if we are to understand Caldwell's full range and his place in contemporary literature.