Review by New York Times Review
A collection of linked stories centers on a rural town and the depraved misfits who live there. THE only display of civic pride evident in Donald Ray Pollock's first book is a blue tattoo the words "Knockemstiff, Ohio" etched "like a road sign" on the bony white backside of a crackhead named Sandy. And even that's suspect, since the tattoo seems less a proudspirited nod to her hometown than a dogtaglike reminder of where she needs to return, or be returned. Located 60some miles south of Columbus, Knockemstiff, which derives its name from a longago fight between two women, is a ramshackle cluster of "shotgun houses and ruststreaked trailers" where the air is suffused with rotteneggscented smog from the local paper mill. Once there was a store, selling gasoline and Doan's liver pills and cigarettes and chainsaw oil, and also a tavern, Hap's, where the bartender dealt speed on the side. A baseball diamond, built by a Vista worker in the '60s, then swiftly reclaimed by green briars, and also a church but that too, as Sandy's boyfriend notes, "had fallen on hard times." It's a mean little place, in Pollock's rendering, where the dominant occupation seems to be petty crime, where wifebeating louts drink Old GrandDad out of car ashtrays and where restless teenage boys spend their weekend nights throwing darts at the fat kid and compensating him with bong hits. It's also the central character of Pollock's collection of linked stories, in much the same way its northern neighbor, Winesburg, played the lead role in Sherwood Anderson's famed story cycle. Aside from their geographical proximity and formalistic architecture, the two books share something else: a concentrated focus on the lonely, the depraved, the neglected the "twisted apples," in Anderson's phrase, or the toadstools "stuck to a rotten log," in Pollock's that prompted Anderson to originally title his work "The Book of the Grotesque." But whereas Anderson tucked the grotesque beneath the staid and steady public lives of his characters, doctors and other professional types among them, Pollock's characters addicts, runaways, squatters, rapists, aspiring molesters, many of them one signature away from internment in "the group home" wear their grotesqueness high up on their sleeves. If Winesburg's social constructs held the unutterable hungers of its citizenry in check, however loosely, in "Knockemstiff" there are no such constructs. Rome has fallen, and it's a Dark Ages freeforall. Nothing to do now but huff some Bactine and head to the Crispie Creme at 3 a.m. to watch the crosseyed waitress doze behind the display case of dayold doughnuts. That last bit makes up the plot of one of Pollock's 18 stories, which range in time, gauzily, from the '60s to the '90s. In another, two boys burn an anthill while one's father is beating his mother and while the other boy is girding himself, per his mother's request, to pretend to be a serial killer and creep up on her in bed with a kitchen knife. In "Blessed," a smalltime burglar and OxyContin junkie discovers that the son he suspected was deaf and mute is neither the child only acts that way when his father is around. In "Assailants" and "I Start Over," a pair of men rise to the defense of "loved ones" they themselves find unlovable one man (partly) taking up for his mentally handicapped wife when a pretty young conveniencestore clerk calls her "like totally gross," and the other, who daydreams about burning his house to the ground with his wife and angeldustwarped son inside, knocking the tar out of some teenagers who were making fun of that droolglazed son in a Dairy Queen drivethrough. Obviously, fatherhood is not a varsity sport in "Knockemstiff." One would need to read the collected works of Pat Conroy to come across so many badhearted, whiskeybreathed fathers stomping across the page. "Mine had skipped out on my mom before I was born," says one character, "and I'd always been ashamed of that." "But maybe," he wisely adds, "I'd lucked out after all." Pollock doesn't sugarcoat the act that leads to fatherhood, either. There's gobs of sex in "Knockemstiff," though not much love. There's sex with mentally handicapped girls and women "retards," in the book's common parlance and grim sexfordrugs exchanges in the backseats of parked cars. Venturing further downscale, there's sex between siblings, sex with a sibling's toy doll and various mentions of sex with a mud dauber's nest, a sweaty sock and a pint of pigs' brains. In "Knockemstiff" live "the kind of women who, out of sheer loneliness, end up doing kinky stuff with candy bars, wake up with apple fritters in their hair." Small wonder, then, that when a young man begins cleaning a dead chicken, in one story, his companion's first impulse is to ask whether he intends to have sex with it. Pollock, who grew up in the actual Knockemstiff, Ohio (which may or may not resemble the town he depicts), and who worked in a paper mill for more than 30 years before enrolling in Ohio State University's M.F.A. program, conveys all this in steely, serrated prose that along with his crippled, disfigured or otherwise damaged characters, as well as his jolting sparks of humor calls to mind Harry Crews. Listen to some opening sentences: "I'd been staying out around Massieville with my crippled uncle because I was broke and unwanted everywhere else, and I spent most of my days changing his slop bucket and sticking fresh cigarettes in his smoke hole." Or: "Standing in his underwear in front of the faded pink duplex that he and Geraldine rented, Del came out of a blackout while taking a leak in the dead August grass." Or: "It was 1 o'clock in the morning on a rainy Sunday, and Sharon was sitting at the kitchen table debating whether or not to stuff another slice of American cheese into her mouth when Aunt Joan called." Note the choice of the word "stuff," however, in that last sentence: there's a faint note of disdain there, which Crews, notoriously softhearted toward his characters, generally wouldn't brook. No, that sounds more like Chuck Palahniuk, whose influence also seems to permeate these stories (cf pigs' brains, above), hobbling the lesser ones. Yet Pollock knows his terrain both geographical and human far too well to reduce his cast to the monotone sacks of bodily fluids that Palahniuk traffics in. False notes are rare, Pollock's voice is fresh and fullthroated, and while these stories travel negligible distances, even from one another, the best of them leave an indelible smear. "I realized I was in the middle of one of those moments in life where great things are possible, if a person is willing to make the right choice," says the narrator of "Blessed," after spying the son he'd thought was mute "forming words I'd never heard him say," and listening, through the trailer door, to "his excited, stuttering voice." That precipice is what Flannery O'Connor had in mind when she wrote of the "moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected." Grace barely flickers across these pages, but when it is sensed, Pollock's characters almost invariably reject it, surrendering to nihilism, trying to forget they ever had a chance. Chalk it up, perhaps, to civic pride. It's the Knockemstiff way. In Knockemstiff, lonely women do 'kinky stuff with candy bars, wake up with apple fritters in their hair.' Jonathan Miles contributes the "Shaken and Stirred" column to the Sunday Styles section of The Times. His novel, "Dear American Airlines," will be published in June.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A native of Knockemstiff, Ohio, Pollock delivers poignant and raunchy accounts of his hometown's sad and stagnant residents in his debut story collection that may remind readers of its thematic grand-daddy, Winesburg, Ohio. The works span 50 years of violence, failure, lust and depravity, featuring characters like Jake, an abandoned hermit who dodges the draft during WWII, lives in a bus and discovers two young siblings committing incest on the bank of a creek, and Bobby, a recovering alcoholic who must face the imminent death of his abusive father. The language and imagery of the novel are shockingly direct in detailing the pitiful lives of drug abusers, perverts and a forgotten population that just isn't "much welcome nowhere in the world." Many of the characters appear in more than one story, providing a gritty depth to the whole, but the character that stands out the most is the town, as dismal and hopeless as the locals. Pollock is intimate with the grimy aspects of a small town (especially one named after a fistfight) full of poor, uneducated people without futures or knowledge of any other way to live. The most startling thing about these stories is they have an aura of truth. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A debut collection of terrifying, darkly funny stories concerning the drug-addled, beaten-down inhabitants of a southern Ohio holler called Knockemstiff. Pollock's characters are in dire straits: They tend to be addicts, brutes, connivers and small-time criminals with big-time depravities. A boy gets caught having sex with his sister's doll in "Hair's Fate." "Pills" depicts tweakers on a binge. In "Giganthomachy," a woman draws tattoos on her son's arm, hands him a pair of scissors and asks him to come into her bedroom pretending to be mass-murderer Richard Speck: "Just spit on the floor, maybe," she says. "Hurt me, but don't really hurt me." Another woman, in "Rainy Sunday," helps her heavyset older aunt lure horny drunks into sex. "Blessed" shows a thief, disabled by falling off a roof mid-robbery, descending into a horrifically graphic addiction to painkillers. Several tales feature epicene young men hectored by violent fathers; others show people trying and failing again and again to escape, or even, finally, to want to escape. Throughout, Pollock shows deep empathy for these whipped and battered souls, most looking not so much for a way out as for a way to let it all slide. As one says, "It's the same for most of us; forgetting our lives might be the best we'll ever do." The stories are strikingly similar in tone, setting, characters, even length, but that's scarcely a problem in a collection as bleakly, unsettlingly funny--and touching--as this one. Pollock grabs by the throat and doesn't let go. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
