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Book Review – Naked in Garden Hills by Harry Crews

Crews is clearly a fan of freak shows, and in this his second novel, published in 1969, he creates another. As ever, it has a strange set up..

Garden Hills is a town at the bottom of a phosphate pit in Florida, which is how it got its hills. It is owned by Mayhugh Aaron (known simply and pictorially as the Fat Man), six-hundred pounds and growing, and who drinks the diet milkshake Metrecal by the caseload. Working for Fat Man is ‘four feet of perfection’, Jester, a ninety-pound midget who dreams the horses he never rode and the races he never won, until his riding was cut short by a fall and from then on, fear. Dolly, once the Phosphate Queen of Garden Hills, is a young beauty who has recently returned from New York to set up a GoGo strip club.

Anyone who is new to Crews should beware about ignoring his literary pedigree at the expense of such madcap scenarios as here. Though this was only his second novel, he was 34, and a master of the narrative learnt from amongst others, Graham Greene.

I say that because he has become, until this year at least, somewhat forgotten. Much of his work is out of print, this being a good example. Though [book:A Childhood: The Biography of a Place|59025814] and [book:The Gospel Singer|60216112] have been reissued by Penguin Classics in the last few months.

This book really needs a publisher to rediscover it.

So think of Crewe’s literary influencers, Greene, Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, stir in a healthy dose of mescaline, triple the serotonin level, and that is a measure of his wild imagination.

Some media reviews call it surrealism, but for me it is just tremendous entertainment.

Here’s a clip..

<blockquote> She was a great-hipped, heavy-legged woman with breasts that haunt the dreams of hungry men.

She was repulsed by Michelangelo’s <i>Creation</i> on the ceiling of the bathroom.

“The body is the work of the Devil,” she said.

But Fat Man’s father only laughed at her and lay superimposing her head onto the shoulders of Adam, pretending that naked Adam was his wife.

And he had sired his son with his wife fully clothed and shoed in a dark room in the middle of the night with her jaws clenched and her teeth grinding and her Bible clutched to her bosom with both hands. </blockquote>