Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock’s 2008 debut short-story collection, was something of an unexpected sensation.
Unexpected in that Pollock was a first-time author at age 53. A sensation because of its uncommonly artful narrative thrust and a visceral, sharp-edged prose style that was as sensitive as it was savage.
Everyone from Chuck Palahniuk to The New York Times praised Pollock as an engaging and uniquely singular new voice on the literary landscape.
Born and raised in the actual Knockemstiff (a small, decaying Ohio town about an hour east of Cincinnati), Pollock quit high school his junior year to work in a meatpacking plant. It wasn’t long before he moved on to a paper mill in nearby Chillicothe, where he worked for nearly 30 years and which was no doubt the inspiration for many of Pollock’s dead-end characters and depraved narrative turns in Knockemstiff.
His follow-up, the 2011 novel The Devil All the Time, centered on Willard Russell, a veteran who carries his physical and emotional scars back to West Virginia and Southern Ohio following World War II. Characteristically bleak and vividly rendered, The Devil All the Time cemented Pollock as a hard-boiled writer unafraid to look into the darkness.
Now comes his long-simmering new novel, The Heavenly Table, another gritty tale about people trying to scrape by in a harsh and often unforgiving world. Set in 1917, it tells the story of three hard-luck brothers — Cane, Cob and Chimney — who, following the death of their father, embark on a murderous crime spree in part inspired by a lurid dime-store novel the trio sees as their Bible. Pollock leavens the narrative’s debauched aspects with his signature ability to see the humanity in even the bleakest of situations.
The Heavenly Table skillfully weaves the brothers’ story with that of Ellsworth Fiddler, a Southern Ohio farmer whose hardscrabble life is made even more challenging when he is swindled out of his life savings and his only son goes missing. The narrative comes to a head when the brothers travel north from their native Alabama and encounter Ellsworth, along the way interacting with a cavalcade of eccentric characters.
“I’ve never been able to come up with a good answer to that question,” Pollock says by phone when asked why he is drawn to such grim subject matter. “I just find it easier to write about those types of people and situations.
“Ever since I started publishing stories, I’ve always had this big fear of boring the reader,” he says. “Most of the stuff that I personally read and enjoy is not nearly as crime-ridden and violent and gritty as the stuff that I write. I’m not personally fascinated by criminals or dark deeds, but this is the stuff that I find easier to do. It’s easier than writing about a good-hearted priest.”
Pollock’s books are riddled with visceral, almost cinematically rendered violence, but it almost never comes off as gratuitous or overly indulgent. We understand why these characters act out the way they do.
“I start off with maybe ‘the why’ — why does this person end up killed or murdered? — and then I just think about the physical motions that would occur in such an event,” Pollock says.
While The Heavenly Table shares a lot with Pollock’s previous works, it’s also a departure of sorts — it’s infused with a dark humor that often works as a salve to the brutality.
“I wanted to tell a yarn or a better version of a dime novel,” Pollock says. “I was thinking, ‘OK, it has to have some humor in it.’ The other part of it was that I just wanted to write a bigger book. With the other two books the sentences are shorter and probably more refined. With this one I loosened it up a little bit.”
It’s now been more than a decade since Pollock took a leap of faith and chased his dream of becoming a working novelist. He’s thankful that those around him, including his father and wife, allowed for such a leap.
“I think he probably thought I was a little crazy for quitting that job, but he didn’t voice it that way,” Pollock says of his father, who worked in the same paper mill as Pollock for decades. “I was taking a big risk leaving, no doubt. But my wife was totally in support with me doing this, and I took the chance. It’s worked out so far.” ©
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 3, 2016.