Like many travel books, Erskine Caldwell's "Afternoons In Mid-America" is fragmentary. Since neither plots nor characters generally hold travel books together, the point of unity is usually the author's observing eye. But Caldwell's eyes never stay on one thing long enough to connect it with anything else. "Afternoons In Mid-America" rushes off in all directions at once, leaving the reader dizzy and, depending on temperament, annoyed or amused.

"Afternoons In Mid-America" skips from the banks of the Mississippi, up to the Dakota Badlands, back to the town of Ogallala, Nebraska, then down into cowboy country and what used to be the dustbowl. With periodic leaps of the imagination to just about anywhere from the mountains of Tibet to the streets of Budapest, Caldwell devotes each chapter to a different mid-American town….

Caldwell fights his own centrifugal force by focusing on similarities among the inhabitants west of the Mississippi...