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ben_miller's review against another edition
4.0
"'Listen,' the voice said. 'I don't care--the whole bleeding world waiting for the sunrise does not care--if half the hillbillies in East Tennessee get stuck in caves. You included. From now on out till the time Republicans love niggers.'"
Robert Penn Warren's writing is for people who love sentences. It's not for people who want a taut thriller about spelunking. If you love his prose, always plentiful and conversational and infused with the poetic sensibility, this book is for you. If you don't--first of all, what's wrong with you--second of all, this book is not for you. Grimmer and darker than All the King's Men, and nowhere near as brilliantly plotted, this is still an excellent novel. It's a tough, hardscrabble story of East Tennessee hillbillies stuck in caves written by a Rhodes Scholar and poet laureate. So that's what you're getting yourself into. And if it wears you out sometimes, the way it tends to meander, it always re-energizes you with a perfectly evocative chapter, or paragraph, or even just a sentence.
Robert Penn Warren's writing is for people who love sentences. It's not for people who want a taut thriller about spelunking. If you love his prose, always plentiful and conversational and infused with the poetic sensibility, this book is for you. If you don't--first of all, what's wrong with you--second of all, this book is not for you. Grimmer and darker than All the King's Men, and nowhere near as brilliantly plotted, this is still an excellent novel. It's a tough, hardscrabble story of East Tennessee hillbillies stuck in caves written by a Rhodes Scholar and poet laureate. So that's what you're getting yourself into. And if it wears you out sometimes, the way it tends to meander, it always re-energizes you with a perfectly evocative chapter, or paragraph, or even just a sentence.
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