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.
