Harry Crews is … a comic novelist of magnificent gifts. His first novel, The Gospel Singer, was a frenetic sideshow of Georgia poor white trash and their Hochkultur—the faith-healer, the electronic guitar, the lavender, tail-finned Buick with all its windows busted out, a theology that makes a hippie out of St. Thomas Aquinas, an addiction to patent medicines, catatonic sermons and knife fights.
His second novel, Naked in Garden Hills, amplified the matter of the first, searching out stranger perversions and darker roots in the heart. The impact of these two studies of the monstrosity of things has either dulled our response, or Mr. Crews is writing too fast. Were This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven not in the neon glare of its predecessors, it would stand out as an extraordinary novel. Alas, it begins to be repetitious, and gluts the imagination. Still, it has some fine touches, and one's time is certainly not wasted by giving oneself up to Harry Crews to be told what happens when a voodoo refugee from Cuba lands in an old folks home in Georgia, falls for the dwarf masseur, and becomes otherwise entangled in the daily life of Georgia Baptists.
Guy Davenport, "Radiant Contempt," in National Review (© National Review, Inc., 1970; 150 East 35th St., New York, NY 10016), Vol. 22, No. 15, April 21, 1970, p. 421.
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