THE HEAVENLY TABLE, latest grit-lit tale of violent woe from Donald Ray Pollock

THE HEAVENLY TABLE
DONALD RAY POLLOCK
Doubleday & Co. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying (and, disturbingly, weirdly funny) new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors.

It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family’s entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it?

In the gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre’s literary masters.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC. THANK YOU!

My Review: Pollock whipped out his ten-inch dick of the imagination and wailed on me again. Lots of n-word use, perfectly in keeping with the period but really uncomfortable to me.

What isn't uncomfortable, and this sounds weird, is the way Author Pollock puts the hurt on every-goddamned-body in this story. No one has it easy; no one catches a break; no one ever gets anything they don't pay double for. It's just like life: Poor folk pay, rich folk skate. And when the moment comes for someone to redress the imbalance, it's going to be hideously expensive to all who can least afford it.

So three bank-robbin' brothers? Two of 'em not too swift on the uptake? What's your bet, will any of 'em make it out alive? Read it and gasp.

As far back as he could remember, there hadn’t been a day when he wasn’t yearning for something he didn’t have. And that wore a man down after so many years, fighting that feeling day after day without any letup. Why couldn’t he ever be satisfied?

The fact is that there's never gonna be a day when these folks catch a break. Luckily they don't expect to...all that yearning does is beget yearning, until the day Cane (meditate upon the boy's name for a moment, appreciating the author's wicked sense of humor) rallies his newly-orphaned siblings around the notion of emulating their dime-novel hero's exploits to go whoring and bank-robbing (in that order). The truth is they get away with the bank robbing because they flat do not give a shit what happens. They were starving when they lived an "honest" life, so being in prison couldn't be any worse now could it? Food and shelter for free is fine when liberty = death.

These lads form the backbone of the book but there is a lot of meat on the carcass. Take, for example, one Bovard the closet queer military man.

Trained in classics, he had entered the military with abnormally high expectations, but unfortunately, the men he had encountered so far were a far cry from the muscle-bound sackers of Troy or the disciplined defenders of Sparta that he had been infatuated with since the age of twelve. Still, even though the draftees had been a sore disappointment, both physically and mentally, he had quickly learned to deal with them. It was simply a matter of lowering one's standards to fit the circumstances. After all, how could one expect any of these poor, awkward, illiterate brutes to have even heard of Cicero or Tacitus when at least half of them had difficulty comprehending a simple order? In just a matter of days, he went from trying to form a Latin reading club to thinking that a lowly private who still had most of his teeth and could name the presidents was practically a paragon of good breeding and sophistication.

Just awful to imagine such potential going to waste...and waste is absolutely what's going to happen to (almost) everyone in this violent, terribly nihilistic book. Yes, there are survivors; no, they aren't unscathed; and one questions how long the survival will last when the fact is that there's a pandemic on its way! How many malnourished people survived the Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919?

That's the hell of it all...as these seekers keep moving and searching, as they do the best they can (and sometimes that is just flat HORRIBLE and vile), the outside world in its utter indifference to them, to their hopes and dreams, is winding up for another punch in the gut. The closest read I can think of to this one, for me at least, is The Sisters Brothers which I wasn't at all fond of. What failed me there was what succeeds so well here: Author Pollock is a superb wordsmith and a talented tale-spinner. This redemptionless and violent world is of a piece with his other creations; the volume's been turned up to eleven, though.

If you've read Knockemstiff and/or The Devil All the Time, you already know what Author Pollock can do; now he's gon na show you what he's been holding in reserve for when he's trying to go proper bleak.

And yeah...he does exactly that. Totally worth the squirms and the winces for the way he pulls off a dénouement so condign you'll forget how gross the trip actually was.

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME by Donald Ray Pollock is a fine novel about rough people

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME
Donald Ray Pollock
Anchor Books
$16.95 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

SEPTEMBER 2020 IS HERE! WATCH THE TRAILER AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THE DEBUT ON THE 16TH!

2020 UPDATE The film's Netflix debut comes in September, and here's a taste of what's to come. (Please overlook the source, the info is in fact good.)

***2017 UPDATE***A FILM IS COMING***starring Robert Pattinson as Reverend Roy. This will be interesting.***

The Publisher Says: “Take a man from Ohio who's worked blue collar, send him for an M.F.A., and set him loose. From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff—called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times—comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. 

In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic over­tones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting. 

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right. 

Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.”

My Review: This is Donald Ray Pollock's first novel. After being mauled and kicked by Knockemstiff, his short-story collection, I was chomping at the bit for this book to come in to my village library. Today was my first wholly peaceful day, and what better thing to do with a peaceful day than to read about the broken and forgotten members of Murrikin society?

So I got on the Greyhound for Knockemstiff, garlic around my neck and an illegal assault rifle perched in the seat beside me, scared stiff that one of these Hill Williams was gonna start some shit with the fancy New Yorker getting' off the bus.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what happened.
.
Look...read Knockemstiff (my review here) and, if you feel the need to bleach your eyeballs and you want to scream, cry, and unswallow on average once a page, this isn't the book for you. It's not that worse things happen in it, although some do happen that made me scream, cry, and unswallow, it's that this novel is unremittingly grim and a lot less easy to stop reading than a story collection is.

I started this book around 4pm. It's now 3am. I paused long enough to eat some cucumber and tomato salad and a wedge of watermelon around 10pm, and I think I piddled around midnight...but that was with the book propped open on the tank top. I'll mop the floor tomorrow...errrmmm, later today.

Pollock is the kind of writer Hemingway wanted to be. Simple, elegantly shod, carefully manicured sentences whip out their truncheons and, never mind the flying blood, wail on the innocent reader's brain-box. Dazed, in pounding agony from the grinding of severely fractured bone plates in the readerly skull, eyes absorb and record and flinch away from the matter-of-fact violence. It's not played for gore or shock. Pollock just...writes it the way it was in his head.

Mother of all the gods. That sentence scares me shitless.

The stories that make up the braids of the novel are, in themselves, good novellas. Put together, though, the effect is overkill. Oh dear. Bad choice of words. It's one bridge too far into horrorville. The last thirty or so pages, while well written, just didn't keep up the pace of revelation. In every other part of the book, there was a blood clot coming loose and causing fresh damage as the characters got closer to the inevitable ending...so I kept moving...and then, well, some of that sense of howcanhetopthis zomg he did it got lost.

And now I will be turning on the Snarkinator. Those whose tastes are for tomes lit'ry which ahhhr evah sew reefahayned, please seek the exits.

Pollock got an MFA. I find MFA writers are all much of a muchness to me. A bit like opening a box of dried dates hoping for something other than a sugar coma, permaybehaps a peppermint or a Red Hot secreted in amongst the sticky soft sweetness. I have my list of offenders, but I've puked on them elsewhere, so I'll leave it at Paul Auster Jeffrey Eugenides Jonathan Franzen Dave Eggers Jonathan Safran Foer et alii, none of whose books I can tell apart from the authors's various ouevres without a look at the spine or title page. Yes yes, nice sentence, lovely image, I'm sorry was something supposed to move me here, to reach across the gap between our brains and change me? Cause it sure as pork rinds didn't. And it never does, all the mooin' and carryin'-on y'all groupies do aside.

And the last, well, last six or so chapters of this novel? They're the first time I felt Pollock's MFA intrude into his writing. He's still got more potency in his keyboarding fingers than those boys. I knock off a whoppin' tenth of a star from perfect because of that. It's a little like complaining that the blowjob didn't last long enough (I don't have any idea what the equivalent is for women, sorry ladies but I am just not anxious to know either). Describe the worst sex you ever had: It was marvelous, as the old joke goes.

And, not a small consideration, is it me, or is it he? I could simply be grumping about this because the way things turn out isn't the way I want them to. But hang on! The ending, you'll recall I said above, is inevitable. And it is. The only ending this book could have. I liked it!

So maybe, just maybe, it's that bloody degree reefahayneeng the gasoline-and-pigshit essence of this wonderful book. I sure as all get-out hate that idea. I suspect it's true. But, and this is KEY, do NOT let this discourage you from visiting the bottom of the heap with Pollock. This is the real deal.

The real deal.

EDITED TO ADD 10/25/2012: The novel has won the Best Foreign Crime Novel prize in France!

KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock...reposting 5-star 2010 review

KNOCKEMSTIFF
Donald Ray Pollock
Anchor Books
$16.95 trade paper, $5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.

My Review: Published in 2008, this collection of eighteen interwoven stories about the lives of the men and women and children caught in rural poverty is the first work by Donald Ray Pollock. He lived in Knockemstiff, a real, honest-to-goodness place. He escaped, sort of, by working for thirty years in a nearby town's papermill.

I don't remember who introduced me to the term “hillbilly noir.” Authors like Bonnie Jo Campbell of American Salvage fame as well as Pollock fall into this category of writers who mine the vein of American underclass misery worked so brilliantly by John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell. Noir it certainly is, thematically and in its laconic, almost kabuki play-like, emphasis on grotesque surfaces, implying that every action and every gesture is born out of unfathomable darkness and unbearable pain. The Publishers Weekly review of this collection compares Pollock's work to Winesburg, Ohio. I agree, from a structural point of view, but Sherwood Anderson's grim stories are the comedy stylings of P.G. Wodehouse compared to this collection.

Pollock is brilliantly successful at portraying the...no. Scratch that.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.

I've been bitch-slapped by this writer's ten-inch dick of the imagination. The stories treated me the way those hillbillies treated Ned Beatty in Deliverance. No part of my brain will ever again be clean and unviolated.

There is one story in this collection that, in my humble (!) opinion, doesn't measure up and doesn't belong: “I Start Over,” about a trip through the Dairy Queen drive-through, would be the star turn of any other writer's collection of stories, but here it merely fills up page count and takes the book over 200pp. Left out, no one would notice or feel a lack.

There are two stand-out stories for me, two that should be in high-school literature anthologies and passed from reader to reader with whispered injunctions just to read it, read it: “Schott's Bridge” is the bleak and horrifying story of a young gay man and his fate in this grim, grim world; and “Bactine,” the shortest story in the collection, a quick hit of despair and decline, as two young men escape the present into a futureless fog. They are, in simplest terms, heart-stopping.

But the story that made me hurt the most, though it's not the finest structurally or stylistically, was “Knockemstiff.” Two strangers in a Cadillac convertible, husband and wife, pull into Maude's store for gas, and for the wife to take photos of the “Welcome to Knockemstiff” sign. The husband makes small talk with the clerk, commenting that “[i]t's hard to believe there's people that poor living in this country.” Their condescending words and actions are invisible to them. It's simply inconceivable to these privileged people that others are not, well, envious but impressed by them. They're blind to their cruelty.

I am that California goon, insensitive lout that he is. I've driven through countless places like Knockemstiff in my expensive car, looked out my window, and thought, “No way. This is a movie set. No one lives here, lives like this.” I've stopped for gas, bought a bag of chips, made inconsequential chat with the clerk, wondering the while how he drags himself out of bed to face another day in that kind of place.

I don't want to believe it's true, you see, and I don't like to think that it's not the subject of outrage and outreach and action.

It isn't. Donald Ray Pollock is their voice, these people in the hollers, shouting at us to look, to look, to see the cost of indifference. He's singing an old song. He's doing it well. He's making art, and seducing the susceptible into seeing the invisible, the ignored, the ignoble and unrefined. His artistry is superior. His eye is unerring. His ear is emotional sonar.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.