Customer Reviews
Great concept sunk by thin characters & ludicrous plot twis - By: , 04 Aug 1999 
I'm a relatively new convert to Crews, but this was the worst of the four books I've read to date. He sets up a great concept to skewer the zeal of salesmen & corporate America, & the first third of the book does grab you, but it soon dissolves into wanderlust. Characters you would have liked to seen fully sketched out & explained are merely pencilled in, & the ending is one of the weakest & unsatisfactory of ANY novel I've read recently. I like it when Crews leaves something to the imagination, but here it just seems like laziness. Mulch this book & pick up "Celebration" or "The Knock-Out Artist" instead.
Compost this book - By: , 16 Dec 1998 
Hey, I LIKE Crews but this book stinks, & its a pity because it starts out good, but it runs into a tough patch & just keeps getting deeper & deeperin it. Every writer has his flaws, & often they are intimately related to his strengths; but played improperly as it were. That's sort of what happens here. Crews starts to work his magic, creating cracker archetypes from a few glimpses, a phrase, a cliche, & a heavy dose of alchemy; but the thing falls apart. The characters never form, they have nothing to do, nowhere to go & too much time to get there, which turns out to be the worst of this calamity because as a consequence they have entirely too much too say about nothing to each other while they wander about committing felony non sequitur for 200 or so pages. I've never seen Crews stumble like this, but this book reads like a novel one readsin spurts over a couple of months: you keep having trouble tying it together & wonder if you've forgotten something. Well, if nothing else it serves to illuminate just how magical Crews other work is, because this reads like a half assed attempt to emulate him. Kind of makes one wonder, after all Jerzy Kosinski...nah..never mind. Oh well, he's recovered now with Celebration, & presumably the new book,so no great loss, but don't waste your time or money on this one unless you are so into Crews that you want to see what happens when he flounders
An insane, inspired look at corporate America - By: , 16 Sep 1998 
I had the wrong impression of this book. I thought it was one of those character portraits, eccentric & revealing, at least of the poor sclub which it details. Wow, was I wrong. I was right that it was eccentric, but it was soin a completely different fashion from what I'd imagined. 'The Mulching Of America' is an absurdist fantasyin all senses of the word but, at heart it really is quite a clever commentary. I recommend this book for it's inventiveness, if not for it's ridiculousness.
Unfocused, but mildly amusing. - By: , 07 Nov 1997 "It does not lather, nor does it clean." So goes the unfilled promise both of Harry Crews' novel & the product its "Soaps For Life" employees hock from door to door. From its slapslick moments, to its hairpin plot turns & half-realised themes Crews never manages to fully explore his territory, never makes his characters likeable or hateable enough for the reader to buy into their predicaments. Unfortunately, we are left with a shoddy soft-sell. Mr. Crews never gets us to sit down at our kitchen table & buy into his prose. He shys away at the door & tumbles off down the block.
