Word: willingham
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...reduce his favorite four letters to three ("fug"), or that there was ever any fuss about poor old Lady Chatterley's Lover and his worshipful deification of sexual organs. John O'Hara, whose writing until recently was criticized as "sex-obsessed," appears positively Platonic alongside Calder Willingham and John Updike, who describe lyrically and in detail matters that used to be mentioned even in scientific works only in Latin...
...South is merely a neutral, abundant earth to be walked on and, where it is interesting, written about. At the spectrum's other extremity are a few novelists to whom the South itself is a vast, febrile malevolence. Among these, on the evidence of Eternal Fire, is Calder Willingham, 40, a Georgia expatriate who now lives in New Hampshire...
Little Flowers. The scent of youthful bitterness suffuses the sarcastic prose bouquet with which Willingham opens the novel: "In this peaceful land . . . the summer sun is a fiery furnace; it boils the blood, cooks the brain, and spreads a fever in the bones. But that same fearful orb, in collaboration with the sweet rain generated by its power, makes the little flowers grow...
After several violent deaths, sundry fornications and an inventively rigged court trial, Author Willingham brings the book to its crowning mockery, a happy ending. The little flowers, pushing up through the mulch of Willingham's Faulkner parodies, Truman Capote parodies and Carson McCullers parodies, nod prettily to each other...
Unfortunately, none of the characters and none of their predicaments ever approach anything real; the only reality in this witty, bitter novel is the author's dislike of the South. But Willingham is a skillful as well as a bitter man, and for a while he makes that reality seem enough...