Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell’s fourth book, is a boldly erotic novel about an overly endowed young Kentucky farmer, his painfully inhibited wife, and an outrageously provocative teen-age boy. Set amid the rigorous years of the Second World War, with the pressures of maximum production needs countered by a minimum of available farmhands, it is an authentic depiction of the way of life of millions of Americans on the home front. But more than a bare chronicle of the rural South, the novel reveals the surprising relationship of a spinster schoolteacher and the farmer (her former pupil), putting to rest the fiction that total sexual inexperience implies a deficient capacity for sensual and perverse imagination.