Lee MaynardReviews

Crum is the first in Lee Maynard's Crum Trilogy. Crum itself is a lousy little berg located in West Virginia right across a polluted river from Kentucky. Nothing much more than a high school, a general store, a scattering of homes in the hills, and place up the mountain where people go to get drunk. The kind of place you drive through and wonder who the hell lives there. The central character and narrator, Jesse (though he is unnamed in this first volume) lives there during his teenage years and wants nothing more than to get out of that place. Jesse is an adolescent at the time of the action set in the 50's mostly, I think. Aside from the general desire to get out of there (eventually and inevitably, he does), the book has no plot. It's an episodic telling of Jesse's adventures involving his friends, his family (almost none), the river, getting shot at by people in Kentucky, swimming in the river, blowing up outhouses and trying to figure out, in fumbling and sometimes explicit ways, the opposite sex. Jesse has almost no "interiority" and most of the other characters are cut outs. But that's OK. It's an easy read and informative too if you want to know more about poverty and the rural south. I liked it.