Crews is a very powerful, at times even outlandish, and uneven novelist. In the tradition of Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O'Connor in his use of the grotesque, Crews has faced directly the problem of encroachment of modernism on the traditional Southern ways of life. He shows in compelling, and often bizarre and violent detail the consequences for modern Southerners of living lives stripped of sustaining tradition and meaning. Crews is ambivalent toward his Southernness…. Crews, interesting as a novelist himself, is also a suggestive instance of a Southerner writing at a time when regional distinctiveness is on the wane, making use of certain traditional Southern concepts, especially the idea of ritual, but dealing with them in the context of a South which is inevitably the modern world. Experiencing the violence and chaos of that world in his very bones, he sensitively and vividly registers the shocks of modern existence, making his work worthy of serious analysis…. [The] basic tension underlying all of Crews's fiction [is] man's yearning for perfection [contrasted with] the inevitable imperfection of the world and life in it. (pp. 97-8)

His works are very stark and elemental, dealing with what man must do to survive in the world. Survival implies the search for something to believe in, some larger entity or set of beliefs through which the individual can approach that perfection he yearns for. In Crews's novels society and Southern tradition provide no stability at all. His settings are either the primitively brutal rural South, where merely living the day is the uppermost consideration, or the commercialized, vulgarized South of modern Florida, where tradition is non-existent. Consequently man is forced back upon himself to find or create his own sense of meaning and belonging.

The form of the novels suggests the desperate human plight. Grotesqueries of plot, situation and character abound…. In essence he distorts the real world to discover the truth beneath the surface of what we all accept as real. This helps explain why he focuses on grotesques and frequently on literal freaks. Certainly following an honorable Southern tradition, he uses grotesque characters to suggest man's incompleteness and alienation, his estrangement from the world, and a sense of the existential absurdity of human existence. Yet his purpose for the grotesque differs in a significant way from that of Flannery O'Connor or Carson McCullers, I think. For those writers, grotesque characters represent deviations from some at least implicit norm. Even though grotesqueness may be the necessary human condition, a standard does exist by which to measure such deviations. Crews is much less sure of such standards. Although he resents critics emphasizing his use of freaks, he has explained why they appeal to him. Freaks are people with obvious and evident afflictions with whom we should feel a kinship because we too have our own aberrations…. In such a view normality becomes a meaningless term, a concept clung to in order to avoid facing the truth. Reading Crews's novels, one does not remain nearly so detached as when reading other novelists of the grotesque, for one does not feel superior to the characters…. Normality is an illusion; all people must face the terror and mystery of existence; the fact that we can hide our aberrations is no consolation and may ultimately lead to their eruption in violent and unpredictable ways.

Crews's use of freaks with imperfect bodies strongly enforces his theme of the human desire for perfection. Man's inherent imperfection, manifested in the body, conflicts with his yearning for spiritual perfection. Crews evokes the traditional duality of body and spirit, the body representing the biological trap man finds himself in, which intensifies his yearning for spiritual sustenance. Thus man is, paradoxically, very primitive, acting on instinct and obsession, and yet also at least attempting to nourish the spiritual side as well, for his aim is always to unite the self through ritual with some higher order of being, association with which will redeem his inherent incompleteness. Such aspiration is almost always doomed to failure, but the effort is itself meaningful.

A significant development in Crews's handling of this theme can be traced in his eight novels. In the first three, The Gospel Singer, Naked in Garden Hills and This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven, one finds a direct treatment of religion as a possible source of meaning. Since religion is always inadequate, in the next four novels, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, Car, The Hawk Is Dying and The Gypsy's Curse, Crews turns to alternate kinds of physical rituals in his treatment of man's search for value, including karate, hawk training and body building. In most of these novels are found a performer and an audience, the rituals of religion having been in effect replaced by the rituals of entertainment. Further these novels consider whether human love and companionship may provide a release from the trap man finds himself in. Such solutions to man's dilemma are finally unsatisfactory, and his latest novel, A Feast of Snakes, suggests that violence of the most horrible kind is the only available response to man's condition. Thus Crews's vision has grown progressively darker over the eleven years he has been publishing his fiction. (pp. 98-101)

His first novel, The Gospel Singer (1968), most explicitly deals with religion, as the epigraph indicates: "Men to whom God is dead worship one another." The setting, Enigma, Ga., which the first sentence says is "a dead end," suggests the human condition. Most residents of the town want to escape, but few are successful. The Gospel Singer has been able to leave, but only through the accidents of his good looks and his voice, and he is constantly drawn back to Enigma. While he purports to be religious, he is corrupt within and tortured by people's attitudes toward him…. [His] sin is his reality, and his sin is connected with Enigma. In the contest of flesh and spirit, he is determined that flesh triumph. So while he may have physically escaped Enigma, he has not escaped the human condition. (p. 101)

By the end of the novel the Gospel Singer realizes that he can hide the truth no longer…. He embraces his common humanity and common grotesqueness with the crowd—and they kill him for his efforts. Religion is thus shown to have no relationship with truth; people want only comfort and the illusion of meaning. At the end of the novel they have reaffirmed their belief in the purity of the Gospel Singer and Mary-Bell….

Naked in Garden Hills (1969), which Crews feels is his best novel, treats religion in an almost allegorical way. Its title evoking the Garden of Eden, the novel includes a God figure who never appears, Jack O'Boylan, an industrialist who looked at Garden Hills, "saw that it was real good," and built a phosphate mining plant. Yet he abruptly and mysteriously withdrew his operation, leaving the residents in an inferno-like landscape to wait and hope for his return, as if they are waiting for Godot. (p. 102)

Jack O'Boylan never returns, but a new savior appears to revive the waste land: Dolly Furgeson. A beauty queen raised in Garden Hills, she went to New York to search out O'Boylan and get a "sign." Stumbling into a job in a go-go establishment, she learns that the world runs on the conjunction of money, sex and power. Realizing that O'Boylan will never come back, she returns determined to open a nightclub to display "Dolly Doo and her Dimple Review" and attract tourists. This is the first instance in Crews's work of a motif which will reappear: the rituals of the beauty contest and show business as manifestations of the modern ideal. (p. 103)

By the conclusion of the novel everyone is consumed by Dolly's voracious appetite for success…. In the Darwinian godless world of the novel, man's desire to find meaning in his life leads to degradation, exploitation and the denial of love. Clearly there is no Garden of Eden to which to aspire….

This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven (1970) effectively disposes of institutional religion as a subject for Crews. The novel deals with old age and death, the ultimate signs of man's imperfection and limitation. Setting the novel in a "Seniors' Club," Crews treats the ways people cope with death by seeking redemption or escape. The central focus of the novel is Jeremy Tetley, an 80 year old man whose time to die has come….

Two characters do combat for Jeremy's soul on the day of his death. One is Junior Bledsoe, an award-winning grave plot salesman who "believed in death with a missionary zeal. He believed in the rightness and justness of death."… Hiram Peters, on the other hand, is a minister who hands out pamphlets with the title, "There Is No Death." Ironically, however, he is an atheist who relies on the pamphlets because of his fear that dying people will ask him to explain their lives—and he has no answers. Thus he has literally willed himself not to believe in death.

Arrayed around these characters are others who seek meaning to their lives. (p. 104)

Born and raised in the Seniors' Club, [Axel] feels she has lived all her life in a grave and wants only to be touched by another human being. She finally seduces—practically rapes—Junior, much against his will since he fears sex, love, and children, suggesting life as they do rather than death. Yet he seems finally won over by her. In this episode is the first suggestion in Crews's works that love offers an escape from man's trapped condition.

Religion, however, is finally rejected. The title refers to Axel, to the Seniors' Club and also by implication to earthly life itself….

Crews's next four novels explore various secular rituals as avenues to meaning, since conventional religion is no longer a force in his world, and he more explicitly considers the role of human love. In Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), karate is an almost religious ritual through which people attempt to link and fulfill body and spirit. A symbol of purity, order, peace and control, it depends on ritual physical training and self-discipline, elements which become increasingly important at this point in Crews's career. (p. 105)

Car (1972) continues the interest in technology so evident in Naked in Garden Hills. As in the earlier novel Crews explores how characters are defined by and cope with technology, in this case the automobile. The most interesting character for my purposes is Herman, an idealist and dreamer who determines to express his love for cars by literally consuming one. Although his actions are corrupted by exploitation and show business, he is actually attempting to perform a communion ritual with his god….

[The] novel suggests, as does Karate, that the spiritual cannot be found through the material, indeed that the spiritual cannot be found at all. After eating the bumper and part of the fender, Herman is unable to continue. (p. 107)

After he recognizes his limitations and abandons his quest, however, he sees Margo as a woman, and the novel's ending implies again the possibility of human love as a vehicle for meaning.

The Hawk is Dying (1973) carries man's search one step further, and the level of desperation is much greater than in Car. George Gattling, owner of a successful car upholstery business, is filled with anxiety over the meaninglessness of his life. He has followed every precept he was taught as a child but finds success empty. The religious elements of his dilemma are suggested by his thoughts on the mystery of God: "How beautiful it all was, he thought, if you could believe it. How terrifying it all was if you could not." Since he cannot believe, the only thing that makes sense is trying to train a hawk. This action represents something "real" to him, a simplification of his life by reducing it to the basics—blood and conquest, and also tradition. For he trains the hawk in a very traditional manner…. Training the hawk also involves training himself: both hawk and man must go without food and sleep until the hawk is "manned." Thus the familiar Crews motifs of self-discipline and self-control reappear, for training the hawk means to George disciplining his own body and spirit as well. However, Crews modifies his vision of love, which was important in his last novels. George does not know what love is, and one of the appealing traits of hawks is that "they could not love. They didn't want to be your buddy. Ever."… On the other hand, George must have love for the hawk to train him properly. (p. 108)

Yet significantly his successful search for fulfillment involves the inhuman, in fact demands the exclusion of the human realm altogether, a change from the previous novels. Crews seems increasingly to despair at the ability of people to reach any real understanding of others. (p. 109)

The Gypsy's Curse (1974) continues Crews's consideration of the role of love as opposed to discipline and training. Marvin Molar is the first actual freak Crews has dealt with since This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven, and since Marvin tells the story in the first person, the reader cannot retain the detachment so characteristic of fiction ofthe grotesque. Crews forces us to see Marvin as a three dimensional human being…. Essentially he is an artist of admirable integrity and devotion, and it is significant that his act consists of balancing, for he is desperately attempting to maintain balance in his grotesqueseeming life.

Into the peaceable male kingdom where he lives and trains comes Hester, a "normal" who brings with her the gypsy's curse, which is translated: "Find a cunt that fits you and you'll never be the same. Never find any peace."… Marvin loves her and in his desire for the normality she supposedly possesses will do anything for her. Yet the irony underlying the novel is that in fact she is a far less complete person than he. Unlike Marvin, whose life does have some meaning, she lives the desperately empty, bored life of modern man. (pp. 109-10)

Marvin's love for her is his curse, his fate, and it upsets the balance which he has painfully brought to his life. In effect, she causes the death of Al, Marvin's father figure, and flaunts her power over Marvin by being unfaithful to him. Powerless, unable to escape his fate, Marvin finally kills her…. This novel continues the reaction against love shown in The Hawk is Dying. (p. 110)

In his latest novel, A Feast of Snakes (1976), Crews returns to rural Georgia, a town suggestively named Mystic, for his most desperate and hopeless work yet. The life of the characters is very primitive—in fact the animals in the book are described as having more beauty than the people—and life is unrelentingly brutal. The brutality is characteristic not simply of rural life, however. The occasion of the novel is the yearly rattlesnake roundup in Mystic which draws tourists from all over the country. They are attracted by the ritual of hunting and killing snakes, and as the novel progresses, the violence in their obsession with snakes comes closer and closer to the surface until it finally spills over in rioting and mayhem.

While in his previous novels some ritual form of self-control was available to channel potential violence and drain off the threat, here such outlets are non-existent. Joe Lon Mackey, the central character, is a former star high school football player who, because he is virtually illiterate, could not attend college…. Life is closing in on him, for he cannot reconcile his former aspirations and his extremely reduced present circumstances. (p. 111)

The novel ends apocalyptically with his murdering four people before he is himself killed by an enraged mob. But while he is killing, "he felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Christ, it was good to be in control again."… To this has the possibility of control been reduced in Crews's latest novel. No ritual, no equilibrium, no balance seem possible. Hope is nonexistent; the only redemption lies in accepting the truth. And the terrifying truth is that we are all potentially murderous grotesques…. Looking at his novels in sequence, one can see that the hope they offer has been gradually reduced, that the sustaining role ritual can play has diminished, and that the arena in which man can constructively act has become narrower and narrower until it virtually disappears.

The world of Harry Crews's novels is mysterious, violent and dangerous. His characters, by nature physically or spiritually grotesque, are often ruled by an obsession or instinct for something higher than simply physical life. Almost always their desires are frustrated because of man's radical imperfection. Individual will and discipline and adherence to ritual may perhaps enable one to attain some kind of control over life, but such control is always tenuous, given the facts of existence and human nature. His vision is a lonely and extremely sad one; the more recent novels strongly suggest that human love is inadequate. Trapped within his own nature, each individual must desperately attempt to find a solution for himself. Perhaps the essence of his vision is suggested by the epigraph to his recent autobiography: "Survival is triumph enough." For survival itself is never a certain prospect in Crews's world. (pp. 112-13)

Frank W. Shelton, "Harry Crews: Man's Search for Perfection," in The Southern Literary Journal (copyright 1980 by the Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Vol. XII, No. 2, Spring, 1980, pp. 97-113.