Place Called Estherville

If you like the new ABC TV show DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES you might like to go back in literary history and see where some of the humorous and yet horrifying small town antics began, and there's no better place to start than Erskine Caldwell's searing PLACE CALLED ESTHERVILLE. There's no article before those three words, it's not called "A Place Called Estherville," it's almost as thouch Caldwell had such contempt for the town he describes he wants to spit out the title as soon as possible because it leaves a nasty taste in his mouth. (By the way, as a sidelight, the town of Caldwell, New Jersey, named in honor of America's great novelist Erskine Caldwell, is the site where some of the HBO series THE SOPRANOS is filmed.) In PLACE CALLED ESTHERVILLE, we get two separate stories that are connected together at the root, a la OLD MAN and WILD PALMS, the stories that make up William Faulkner's famous "novel" of weather and deceit. In PLACE a brother and sister come to the eponymous town and attract a certain amount of unwanted attention. Due to their mixed race background, they are physically extremely attractive, Tommy to the young white teenage girls and desperate housewives of Estherville, where he tries to make a living as a houseboy, [...] Kathyanne, his beautiful and demure sister, can't even walk down the street without being accosted by men who treat her like she was an animal. The book is brutal and frequently obscene, and puritanical parents of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s didn't want their children, either black or white (or both), reading such trash. But today we can see with the benefit of hindsight that there wouldn't have been a socialist party without Erskine Caldwell, nor would there have been James Baldwin or indeed today's popular hip-hop. It reads like the wind. Once you start you won't be able to put it down until the explosive ending. If everyone read this book our race problems as a nation would shrivel up and explode like so many raisins in the sun.

A beautiful, young teacher comes to a small southern town to teach high-school. Within a week's time, a student, a married man, and several bachelors fall in love with her and ask her to marry them. A little far-fetched, but interesting and fun. Crux of the story was the woman always wants the man she couldn't and shouldn't have and that is her downfall. In addition, the women are jealous and start scandalous rumors about her. A tense tale.