[3][8] Her father, Christopher Clark, wrote novels of working class life, including The Unleashed Will (1947) and Good Is for Angels (1950).
[17] The lives of Lee's forebears are chronicled in Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture and the four-volume William’s House, for which Perdue drew on records of his own family history.
"[1] Perdue often incorporates elements of fantasy (like active volcanoes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Alabama)[19] or, in later novels, science fiction (like the "escrubilator," an indescribable "omni-competent" machine).
[6] Anne Whitehouse of the New York Times finds Lee "vitriolic and hallucinatory, yet surprisingly lucid, producing a portrait both exceedingly strange and troubling.
"[18] In the New York Press, Knipfel praises Perdue's "fluid, consciously musical prose,"[14] "full of rage but under complete control," noting that it becomes "progressively textured and more savage" with time.
[1] However, Publisher’s Weekly finds that Lee "sinks under the weight of its own pretensions";[22] and Dick Roraback of the Los Angeles Times complains of Perdue's eccentric (mis)usages in The New Austerities.
[23] Thomas Fleming calls the Pefley sequence "some of the best satire on contemporary America";[24] and Kirkus Reviews notes the "marvelous black comedy" in Lee.
[25] Antoine Wilson of the Los Angeles Times finds "tone-deaf caricature" in some satirical passages of Fields of Asphodel, but praises its "utterly charming and brilliantly comic" denouement.