SUMMERTIME ISLAND
By
Caldwell's jugs of po' white Southern sourmash keep piling up paperback dividends--with the usual malodorous ingredients: sledgehammer sex, relentless sadism, and an occasional slice of shrub pine scenery. This time sixteen-year-old Steve gets what Caldwell considers the full deep Tennessee treatment. A few days on a ""summertime"" island with Uncle Guthry unfolds the racial drama between scarlet-necked Troy Pickett and ""educated"" Negro Duke Hopkins. Troy is as rapacious and mean as an hysterical vulture; Duke is as noble as Sidney Poitier amidst a lark of singing nuns. Inevitably even Duke's patience and forebearance wears and Troy is momentarily bested; but Troy has the last word by running down Duke with a truck after the island visit. As for Steve, an underwater festival with bonny Bonnie, the sometime waitress, and a midnight visit from Aunt Rosemary. Uncle Guthry's wife, enlarge his horizons. Uncle Guthry, who looks on sadly through most of Troy's dirty work, hoped that Steve's island visit would be educational yeah! Twilight over a dry still.