Turnip

THE SURE HAND OF GOD (243 pp.)--Erskine Caldwell -- DuelI, Sloan & Pearce ($2.75).

The godless little acre of squalor and lechery staked out by Novelist Erskine Caldwell has been tilled to exhaustion (Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, Tragic Ground). But Caldwell still goes on. His latest harvest is an unappetizing literary turnip called The Sure Hand of God.

In the sociology of Southern degeneracy, his "hangdog and hookworm" set have become boring stock types. There is, for example, Molly, who "was not the kind who would think of drawing a line between a married man and an unmarried man when it came to the matter of an evening's entertainment." Next to men, she liked baked hot dogs and red wine. When she felt real low, she gave herself "vitamin" shots, and she often felt low because "they all go for young girls and skinny widows under 35. Nobody wants to sleep with a middle-aged old widow as big as a ginhouse roof. I haven't got a chance in the world now."

Caldwell's point is that Molly never did have a chance. She was a sharecropper's daughter and early seduced, went from bed to worse until she set up in business for herself in Agricola. When she married Putt Bowser, the town's aging odd-job man, she settled down to housekeeping and running down a husband for Lily, her 16-year-old illegitimate daughter. Then Putt had to go and get himself killed. Said Molly, the day of the funeral: "Maybe it wasn't his fault, but I ought to have had the sense to pick out a man who could've dodged a train on a track."

The rest of Caldwell's characters are off the same near-caricature assembly line as Molly and Lily. For the perennial Jeeter-type there is Jethro, Putt's shiftless farmhand brother. The strait-laced minister's young wife has "vitamin" binges with Molly on the sly, finally runs off with a salesman. "He [Rev. Bigbee] won't even let me undress without turning out the lights, and I have to wear long-sleeved nightgowns that drag the floor. This morning as soon as he left I took off all my clothes and ran out into the backyard and said 'God damn it to hell!' as loud as I could."

The Sure Hand of God is gamy enough to attract the censors. It has little to merit anyone else's attention.

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