"This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven" covers a day at the old folks home in Cumseh, Ga., "just a regular old Sunday in the Senior Club," as one character remarks….

It's a preposterous novel, but there is something more seriously wrong. The offensive element is an all too common one—the irresponsible establishment of distance between the narrator and his subject, a willed distance, that allows the cheapest kind of god-playing, the setting up of these quaint, oddly named characters, who frenziedly work out the destiny invented for them by a none-too-clever puppeteer.

The characters are all as devastatingly trapped as they are boorish. The author tries to provide them with a past, with a self, but the past is unconvincing, the self little more than a form required by the conventions of the novel. Better writers, and one in particular that Harry Crews's work might bring to...