The Mulching of America

by Harry Crews

From Simon & Schuster, The Mulching of America is Harry Crews' latest work of unforgettable fiction.

Celebrated for his slightly warped comic and moral vision of contemporary America, the author Harry Crews tells the story of a door-to-door salesman's struggle with his Boss, a man with a genius for selling junk.

Genres: Fiction, Southern Gothic, 20th Century, Contemporary, American

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Harry Eugene Crews was born during the Great Depression to sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. His father died when he was an infant and his mother quickly remarried. His mother later moved her sons to Jacksonville, Florida. Crews is twice divorced and is the father of two sons. His eldest son drowned in 1964.

Crews served in the Korean War and, following the war, enrolled at the University of Florida under the G.I. Bill. After two years of school, Crews set out on an extended road trip. He returned to the University of Florida in 1958. Later, after graduating from the master's program, Crews was denied entrance to the graduate program for Creative Writing. He moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he taught English at Broward Community College. In 1968, Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published. Crews returned to the University of Florida as an English faculty member.

In spring of 1997, Crews retired from UF to devote himself fully to writing. Crews published continuously since his first novel, on average of one novel per year. He died in 2012, at the age of 78.

Reviews

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You can't help watching what you can't stand watching."

The Mulching of America is a ferocious novel in which Crews takes a presidential shit (yes I came up with that) on American capitalism, industriousness and materialism. Quite early in the novel is the most pathetic humiliation of a door to door soap salesman, Hickum Looney, in which Hickum is stripped of his clothes and thrown out of a conference because he did not obey the ridiculous rules laid down by his Boss. In the simmering heat, on the way to his car, the semi-naked Hickum shits all over his legs. But then, a foul mouthed woman on the footpath, Gaye Nell, with an aggressive pet dog, in a strange act of kindness, takes off her top and offers it to him to wipe the shit off his legs and place it in the seat of his car so that he can drive. The scene ends with Hickum and Gaye Nell sharing a tender hug in his car with her naked freckled breasts against his chest. Well yes, that is the kind of thing you can expect in a Harry Crews novel. Remember the furniture breaking sex at the start of Body so that the female bodybuilder can lose weight for the competition? Hyperbolic sex scenes are a part and parcel of Crews novels. But this one was a bit too much I guess :)

Anyway, the whole novel is about the sad life of Hickum Looney who has spent nearly twenty three years of his life as a door to door soap salesman. He falls in love with the round house kicking prostitute Gaye Nell but is barely able to keep her happy. Other hyperbolic all American characters include his sadistic Boss (called simply as the Boss) who has a harelip, Bickle - an aggressive competing salesman who is like a heavy for the boss, Ida Mae - an ageing single woman who helps Hickum sell a whole lot of soaps, Slimey - an auto mechanic who is also a rapist Vietnam war vet, Lafarge - the Boss' much abused chauffeur who plots revenge and Russel the Muscle - Russel is a character who has appeared in both Body and The Gypsy's Curse. Over here, he is a rather pathetic character, a bodybuilder on the decline, working as masseur, a victim of the Boss' sadistic fantasies. Mukherjee, a Bengali waiter makes a cameo appearance. No subtle characters in Crews novels. They are all loud and sweaty and secreting some other bodily fluid or the other.

I looked up the meaning of the word "mulching". Google returned the following:

"The process of covering the open surface of the ground by a layer of some external material is called mulching & the material used for covering is called as 'Mulch. ' Mulching is usually practiced when cultivating commercially important crops, fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, nursery saplings, etc."

The use of the word mulching in the title is not some facile attempt at being metaphorical. Literal mulching takes place in the novel.

This is a vicious and heart breaking novel filled with some humbling truths about modern life across the world. We (even us in the third world) all live in our little Americas. It did run out of steam in the second half with a rather meandering account of Hickum's love life. Maybe because the first half was so action filled. It also did not have the typical Crews ending where one of the characters explodes in some terrible act of violence.

Some great lines from the novel:

"If the grief was deep enough, the world and everything in it was transformed into salvation of one kind or another. Hickum had always thought that a man broken badly enough in body and spirit could be sold anything at any price, and the more broken and troubled he was, the easier it was to sell him. Who else but poor, broken, and troubled men and women could be sending all that money to all those preachers on television who daily told all the poverty-ridden, death-stricken listeners who could hear their voices that the first thing they had to do was quit taking their medicine and quit eating so much food and quit trying to stay warm in the winter and send every cent they had to the Service of God? Then magically the address of the Service of God appeared on the screen."

“Breasts,” he said, staring in a way that he wished he could stop but could not. They were small, cantilevered, and full of freckles. The breasts of a young girl, as best he could remember young girls’ breasts being anyway."

"Hickum didn’t know what was in the contract and he was sure she didn’t, either. He had never heard of an employee actually reading one of the things. It was thick as the Bible, for God’s sake, and written in print that was as small as the print in the King James Version that was in every household in the South. At least as far as Hickum knew, every household in the South had one. Certainly everybody back in east Tennessee had one. When he was growing up he could not remember going into a parlor or sitting room where the Bible, black and thick as a man’s wrist, was not prominently displayed. But that didn’t necessarily mean that a single person, man or woman, living in one of the houses scattered throughout the entire countryside had actually read the thing from cover to cover. It was unthinkable."

“Want in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first.” - did Terry Zwigoff steal this one for Bad Santa?

[David]

WARNING --- FIZZY GRAVY ALERT!!

Truth in Reviewing: I didn't finish this, didn't even make it to page 100. But I read far enough to know that I really just had no desire to punish myself further. Crews mines the seamy underbelly of the white trash south for yuks, and it's funny for a while. But subtlety is not part of his arsenal, so things just get weirder and weirder, until you're in a universe so bizarrely warped, you wonder what the point of reading on might be.

So I could (barely) forgive him the megalomaniac head of Soaps for Life, who terrorizes his door-to-door salesforce with Hitlerian zest. I thought I could forgive him giving The Boss a harelip and a huge Napoleon complex. Until one too many sentences like this:

"I always have na use a whip na drive all nu people about nike beasts, and nu have na nerve na nell me nure late because nu stayed out nair and sold of nure own free will?"

By the time the book's (anti)hero, Hickum Looney (yes, really), undergoes ritual humiliation by the rest of the Soaps for Life salesforce, culminating in his being stripped only to his skivvies, causing him to lose control of his bowels, left to drag his bescumbered body through the 90-degree heat in search of his car -- well, by then, I had my doubts.

The clincher was having Crews mention at least four times in a couple pages the motions of Hickum's wrinkled, shrivelled member during this car-seeking odyssey, not neglecting to remind us of the 'black crusty streaks' ....

Look, I love a book that mixes eschatology and scatology as much as the next guy. But it's a delicate balance, Harry. One which you singularly failed to achieve here. Unless you were trying to work out some deep toilet training issues of your own.

Life is way too short for this kind of lientery.

[Michael Compton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over-the-top Southern Gothic, full of memorable characters and humor, both crude and otherwise. A satire of the American salesman that is every bit as biting as Glengarry Glenross (but with more laughs).

[Philip Fracassi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whatever. I don't get Crews. Sorry, wish I did...but I don't.

I don't necessarily trust writers from Florida, in general.

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

another great story from harry crews. a soap salesman, a girl, other folk. harry uses a finnish word in this one, maybe the longest one-word palindrome in the world:

saippuakivikauppias: door to door soap salesman. hickum looney.

"jesus scared the hell out of hickum, not because he was a believer but because he was superstitious."

"people nowadays don't seem to know what's public and what's private. they just go ahead and tell anything and everything."

...hickum, having "caught the scent of blood spoor, the sweet fragrance of old mortality."

a pile of zany characters living the dream but life and all that entails keeps getting in the way. still they plug on and try to make do.

[Tess Johnson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry Mackenzie - it started off a 3 star and just got more and more tiresome, and well… yeah.

[Stephen Kuban · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite claiming to be a satire on America, this book is nowhere near smart enough to be satire. Unfortunately, this feels like an only slightly altered lens through which an angry person truly sees the world. It’s bitter, it’s angry, it’s colourless, it’s unimaginative, it’s vulgar. The grotesque vulgarity is painful and pointless. The characters are miserable and one dimensional at best. The book is 80% dialogue, and the dialogue is painful and fake and gruesome. What’s the point of a character in a wheelchair peeing on the carpet when he’s stuck in a doorway during a phone call? It makes no sense! What I can say for this book is that it offers a sociological and philosophical insight into the mind and perspective of those left behind. The author strikes me as an angry and disillusioned individual, and this book was his attempt at expressing that and making it funny. It’s just not funny. Particularly the women characters are given zero depth, they’re props: pieces to be used by men, by the author himself. If I wanted to give credit to the author I’d say that this was the point of the novel, but the book isn’t smart enough for that. There’s nothing to indicate this portrayal was deliberately done to be thought provoking. A book that’s 80% dialogue isn’t that. Interestingly, his written rhetoric isn’t terrible and is at times funny! No idea why the author chose to lean into crass unimaginative dialogue when the message through his written rhetoric could actually work. Anyways. Terrible book.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know how I feel about people who say that such a book made them cry or laugh out loud. Do they really break out laughing or crying in public? They say they do, but I'm not sure I believe them. Am I cold-hearted for only giving an occasional slightly louder than normal exhalation when something special happens?

Here with Crews I exhaled almost to the level of a snort! Maybe that's hyperbole, I wouldn't go that far. Here's the thing though, I loved Crew's dialogue amongst his characters. It is just so witty, with such great flow. Banter is the current word for it.

[John-Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Crews but still strong on his vivid depiction of out-of-the-mainstream characters and their stories.

[Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not read a better book by Harry Crews.
This is an amazing book!!

[Jake Kasten · Rating 5 out of 5]

By nature of it being a Harry Crews book it is going to be 5 stars.

This book is incredibly similar to Celebration, especially the female protagonist in both - Celebration’s Too Much and Mulching’s Gaye Nell Odell are both young hotties with colorful pasts (both of which involve prostitution) who fall for much older men but take no guff from anyone, especially their partners. It is interesting seeing the characters almost act as the angel and the devil in each book - Gaye Nell Odell brings love and justice with her in her travails while Too Much is chaos. In the end I think this book has a slight edge on Celebration.

Crews continues his skewering of capitalism and The American Dream. There’s not a sane character to be found in this book, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Crews observing the very American world of door-to-door salesmen. It’s written as much more of an out and out comedy than his earlier darker work.

Hickum Looney, over the course of 25 years, has sold the most for the Soaps For Life company, a record only exceeded by the Boss himself, a one-toothed madman with a harelip who promises the world through his dreadful soap products and has amassed a fortune in doing so.

Looney’s life changes when two women enter his solitary existence; Ida Mae, an old woman abandoned by her husband who he sells to, and Gaye Nell Odell, a young sex worker, and her vicious pit bull, Bubba.

The plot is completely crazy, and if it were possible, becomes even more so in its last chapters. It’s far from being classic Crews. Perhaps if he had attempted less in terms of plot and amused the reader simply with his characters, who are funny, though my preference is to see his darker side, which there is little or none of here.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

As there is not an extant shortage of terrific writers it stands that any given reader will only get around to any number of them writers later in the game that might seem defensible. My having only gotten around to Harry Crews already well into my thirties seems doubly incomprehensible considering that a woman I lived with for a number of years in my twenties had a collection of his books. The belated discovery of Crews seems most regrettable simply because he is a writer who would have excited great delight in me when I was a rough-and-tumble youngin'. He is a ferocious, hellacious writer whose ferocity runs to the darkly comic, the grotesque, and the socially irresponsible. His 1976 novel A FEAST OF SNAKES is one of the finest American novels I have ever read, its genius positively brutal. His memoir A CHILDHOOD: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE, from two years later, is a more measured and intimate work that resonated with my in ways deeply personal, though it likewise rises to face certain cruelties of human existence head on. A later work, published in 1995, THE MULCHING OF AMERICA, the title very telling, is not as strong a novel as A FEAST OF SNAKES, but it definitely distinguishes itself as a rollicking farce taking aim at American life with considerable gusto. It tells the story of door-to-door soap salesman Hickum Looney, whose sobriquet, according to one Gaye Nell Odell, an itinerant ex-prostitute living in an abandoned VW van with her pitbull when we and Hickum first meet her, “sounds like the name of somebody that’s afflicted.” Crews has a previously mentioned flair for the grotesque, and the novel is very far removed from traditional realism, consecrating a particular kind of baroque exaggeration serving both to distort and to lampoon. It is telling that its denigration of American life is engineered around the story of a salesman. What were salesmen if not the stalwart, indefatigable ronin of 20th century American life, traveling the highways and byways in glum solitude, peddling bullshit over and above their dubious wares? What is the salesman but just another put-upon prostitute, demoralized by his labour, pursuing desperate subsistence in service to the corrosive triumph of commercial enterprise, often as not a kind of colossal grift? Hickum on the subject of his vocation: “Yessireebob, well said! Me? I try to cover the waterfront. I’m everything to every man and to every God, dead and dying. I’m a believer and a disbeliever. I go out when I come in. Janus faced, too. At least they called it that in olden times, or at least that’s what the Company has to say on the matter anyway.” The Company. You see, Hickum works for an outfit called Soaps For Life, a concern which increasingly presents itself to be so extensively constrictive as to seem like an institution out of Kafka, and which is presided over by the outrageously maniacal Boss, he of the slight stature, compact physique, spasmodically sadistic temperament, and the debilitating speech impediment for which a disfiguring harelip is to blame. The protean Boss, later to become Elmo Jeroveh, and lastly Roy, apparently in deference to the name his mother gave him, is malevolent demon and a master of sales. He is also the author of the Soaps For Life Sales Manual, which would seem to be an inscrutable text containing much, equipped even with a chapter on the applications of Shakespeare. “The Company thought—correctly, as it turned out,—that it would not do for the manual to be too consistent, so they deliberately threw in errors and bad direction and greeting-card poetry in an effort to make the salesman seem more nearly human.” If the ronin has his Samurai Code, the Soaps For Life man has his Manual. In case we didn't grasp the fundamentals, late in the novel we are told that the manual quotes one of America's presidents, though Hickum ain't sure which one: “The business of America is business.” That's about the size of it. It dovetails nicely with the prostitute's creed: “give dollar value for dollar paid.” Ah, yes, and hence wage slavery, the stupid nightmare in which most of us live. Harry Crews' America is full of stupid people, the culture having pureed their brains. But these are stupid people who are sometimes extremely canny and who are uniformly sporting a whole heaping hell of a lot of personality. Most of us are likely to be most especially taken by the aforementioned Gaye Nell Odell with her filthy mouth and expertise with both shuto uki and the Okinawan roundhouse. The first 17 chapters of the THE MULCHING OF AMERICA (comprising about two hundred pages) take place over the course of no more than about 24 hours, and for at least that long the novel feels like a snowball gaining mass and dimension as it careens downhill, nary a single peripheral character failing to be comprehensively drawn in and incorporated for the duration of the descent. Some of this stuff feels practically like automatic writing. This is where we sort of begin to have something like a problem. I do not feel like Crews, firing on all cylinders and spraying ammunition willy-nilly, has been satisfactorily judicious about what he includes and excludes. Though I love my novels full of the most obscene and reprehensible things imaginable, at least from time to time, I cannot help but feel that Crews is sometimes crass in a lazy and undercooked way. That being said, the novel is so funny and so kinetically strung together that I didn't have the least trouble sticking with it. Crews was born and raised in Georgia and spent much of his adult life writing and teaching in Florida. It is impossible to consider him anything other than a novelist of the American South, and that is a very particular and endearing variety of phenomenon. What he shares with William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, the most esteemed members of this species, is, among other things no doubt, a preternatural gift for crackling southern-fried dialogue. THE MULCHING OF AMERICA, no matter its minor faults, has some absolutely knock-your-socks-off dialogue. Has it in spades. What I also love very much is its general quality of rhythm. Perhaps the ideal incarnation for this text would be its adaptation to Book on Tape read by the DUKES OF HAZZARD narrator at a motormouth clip. The novel attains formidable glide and part of what I was often chuckling and grinning at was the ride itself. And, I mean, let's be clear: much of this book is spectacularly funny. How seriously should we take THE MULCHING OF AMERICA as social critique? Sufficiently seriously, but no more than that. By the final pages we are so squarely in Kafka country that I cannot help but note that any effort to index the real world has been all but suspended. The moral of the story, perhaps: what a pitiful goddamn piece of business this tacky palace we have erected, and how unspeakably vulgar our work, perhaps we all oughta be compost, but I'll be damned if folks don't tickle me pink. I also note the revelation in which "it occurred to Hickum that everybody was only doing what he was told, and most depressing of all, that included himself.” Hmmm. Hickum and that ol' Nuremberg defense? What is a guileless reader to make of this? All of us who play ball: we are neither convicted nor exonerated in this particular court, but I think Crews would like to let us know that we have suspended all right to be legitimately pitied.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny and disturbing indictment of the business of sales in America and how it affects the soul - imagine Coupland, O'Connor, Palahniuk thrown together in a blender.

[Burwinkle Hendershot · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is my first Harry Crews book, and I suspect it'll be my last. Too bad, because after reading a couple of prominent recommendations, I thought I'd discovered a potential favorite author. That was not to be the case, as I only made it to page 100 of The Mulching of America before becoming tired of its disjointed and humorless absurdity.

Now, I like absurdity when it's handled well. Characters in absurd situations can react to their circumstances with a sense of logic that makes the situation plausible. But these characters constantly had me saying "why the hell'd they do that?" Why did a young woman give her only blouse to a stranger so that he wouldn't soil the seat of his car with his shit-stained legs? Beats me--it makes no sense and it's not even funny, but it's only one example of the stilted and senseless ways the cardboard characters interact in this book.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

[Stan Lake · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The mulching of America” by Harry Crews was…interesting. Definitely not a bad book but also not one of my favorites from him. The story keeps you reading because it’s so absurd and unbelievable. You wonder why these people are doing the things they do, I’m sure it’s some sort of analogy about blindly following leaders but it just makes me mad how dumb and spineless the people are. If that’s the intent, bravo. I didn’t hate the book but I really didn’t like it a whole lot either. I’d say it’s worth reading but I’d also say if you’ve never read Crews don’t start with this one. Do yourself a favor and read “feast of snakes” or one of his other books first.

[Erik Wyse · Rating 3 out of 5]

While not amongst the strongest of Crews' career, The Mulching of America is not without its deranged charm, a study in American Greed and class struggle. Crews pushes the characters to their limits, bending and sometimes breaking them along the way. In this particular world, everyone has their faults, and no one escapes unscathed.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the usual Crews Romp (sexually extreme, violent, grotesque, macabre, scatalogical, hilarious, politically-incorrect, slapstick)—but then takes a very dark turn which completely redeems the work and even brushes up against profundity. He also empowers women in a surprising way for someone so old school. Impressive. Liberating. Important. I'm a fan.

[Andres Eguiguren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a weird little novel to read. Having just read his well-regarded A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, I thought I would read one of his novels a crack. The Mulching of America has its moments, but you need to be in the mood for a farce as it is quite over the top in its parody of American consumerism in Florida circa mid-1990s.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scathing satire of salespeople and especially the capitalist / corporate structures that trains them.
I will be purchasing all the Harry Crews I can find. The book was well written and quite comic, and sadly accurate of the salespersons job / training methods.
I should add, I was recently terminated from a sales position.

[Neven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Completely nonsensical and ludicrous, written as if Crews himself didn’t know what the next page of the book would bring or what the previous one had been about. But the dialog sparks, the details are great, and it’s just funny as heck throughout.

[Tim Erwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A farcical critique of capitalism that boils down to a pretty overwrought religious allegory. Definitely not one of the best Crews novels, but hilarious at times and compulsively readable. Some great moments/Crewsian dialogue throughout.

[Bill Sanwald · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like this one as much as "Scar Lover". I'll read more Crews but I think I'll take a break for now.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun read with quirky and memorable characters. A little dated, but nostalgic is a weird way.

[John Stisk]

Don't get it. Sorry.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a re read and it feels perfect for todays social experiment

[Kathleensakal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not like author

[Heath Creel]

Felt really weird when reading this book

[jrm555 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little more like "Confederacy of Dunces" this time, but more unhinged.

[Al Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

I get why crews looked back on this one and said it could’ve used editing. Fun but a little too off the rails, ends like most crews books with a big bang but it doesn’t pay off like usual.