The heavenly table

Review by New York Times Review

GIVEN ITS TITLE, you could be forgiven for mistaking Donald Ray Pollock's second novel for another celebrity cookbook - the kind of thing you might find alongside Gwyneth Paltrow's "It's All Easy" at your local big-box superstore. Fortunately, there are no recipes to be found within this wild, rollicking and wonderfully vulgar novel, but the people of "The Heavenly Table" sure are hungry. All is not easy, least of all for the famished, and it is distinctly refreshing to read contemporary American fiction that concerns itself with such a fundamental problem of existence, far beyond the closed loops of affluent friends cloistered in the same old corners of urban America. Which isn't to say Brooklyn doesn't play a role: Were it not for one of that borough's failed poets and his dime-store pulp, Pollock's destitute heroes would never have become the Jewett Gang and much of the novel's mayhem might have been avoided. But more on that in a moment. It's 1917 on the Georgia-Alabama border, and Cane, Cob and Chimney Jewett are living in a shack, clearing swampland for Major Tardweller, their cruel landlord-cum-employer. They're scratching by on fried dough, the remains of a "sick hog" and whatever else their father, Pearl, can provide, which isn't much. When Pearl meets a mystical drifter who survives on the creatures crawling in his beard, the man advises him to "welcome all the suffering that comes your way" and promises him that one day he will "eat at the heavenly table." It's the usual hokum used to placate the poor - suffer on earth, be rewarded in heaven - but Pearl is stirred. That is, until he drops dead behind a bush mid-bowel-movement. Then the boys take a machete to Tardweller's skull, steal his horses and head for Canada Meanwhile, outside Meade, Ohio, a sort of semi-Sodom where a barbarous barkeep tortures patrons to death (and where, as the United States enters World War I, people are "kicking dachshunds to death, making 90-year-old Americans with German-sounding names get down on their knees in the streets and kiss the American flag, calling sauerkraut Liberty cabbage"), we meet the Fiddlers, Eula and Ellsworth, two farmers still reeling from having been swindled out of their life's savings. They're searching for their ne'er-do-well drunk of a son, Eddie, who, not long after blasting his mother's beloved cat to bits, has gone missing. Ellsworth, dim and sweet, with a weakness for hooch, is determined to find the boy and return him to the righteous road. Inevitably, the Jewett Gang, seeking to lay low for a while, ends up at the Fiddler farm. With a huge bounty on their heads, and accused of a host of crimes including necrophilia, bank robbery and murder, the boys find they need Eula and Ellsworth, who, as it turns out, need them too. What is at first a purely transactional relationship becomes something more tender. Do the boys make it to Canada? What are the odds? On the surface, it's a classic cowboy plot: three (mostly) good-hearted outlaws riding off in search of a better life, with the law and an assortment of ragtag posses on their tails. Pollock has set himself the task of working within the constraints of genre, but because he's such a smart and funny writer, he's incapable of delivering an empty entertainment. And in fact, one slowly discovers the novel to be both a subtle critique of snobbery in general and a particular snobbery that claims to distinguish "serious" fiction from unserious. Yes, "The Heavenly Table" is an old-fashioned yarn with a pretty predictable plot - but that's the point, and as with "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (an obvious influence), it is also a riotous satire that takes on our hopeless faith in modernity, along with our endless capacity for cruelty and absurd pretension. Which returns us to that Brooklyn poet's pulp, the book within the book, "The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket." A hard-worn copy serves both as the Jewett boys' primary source of entertainment and as a bad man's Bible. Here, in one of Pollock's many amusing interstitial asides, we spin away from the central story and learn a bit about Bucket's creator: "The author, Charles Foster Winthrop III, a failed poet from Brooklyn who had once dreamed of becoming the next Robert Browning ... had filled the book with every act of rape, robbery and murder that his indignant, syphilitic brain could possibly conceive." Despite having written 20 of these potboilers, Winthrop is unable to make a living, so "the hack brushed the rat turds off his one good suit and chugged down enough turpentine to peel the paint off a two-story house, ... another forgotten casualty of the callous and fickle literary world he had once hoped to conquer." On one hand, here's Pollock winking at us. He's a talented, serious and agile writer, who possesses genuine tenderness for the dim and luckless, the uncouth and poor, people whom the "callous and fickle literary world" aren't much interested in these days. As a result, he's always at risk of being ghettoized by the homogeneous club (mostly white, mostly wealthy) that determines what is "literary" and what is not. On the other hand, there's more here than a northward gibe. Good satire cannot be mired in bitterness. It should always propose some semblance of a solution, no matter how minor. Pollock's, aside from a little love and friendship, lies in stories, in literature, in the ability of books - of all genres and brows - to ease the pain of being alive. No matter how grim the lives of the people in "The Heavenly Table," no matter how deluded, pretentious, vile and pathetic they (and we) may be, literature provides relief and pleasure, hope and consolation. From Bloody Bill Bucket to "The History of the Peloponnesian War," from Huck Finn to "Richard III," all of which feature here, stories soften the blows of poverty and all its attendant suffering. Pollock grants each of his many characters, no matter how minor or wretched, a story and a soul, and one of this novel's most vivid and original is Jasper Cone, sanitation inspector. His job, which he performs with absolute passion, is to wander Meade with a long, ringed stick, measuring the levels of each and every outhouse. This is a man obsessed with toilets and their contents, who "because of his access to everyone's privy ... could at times be spot on when it came to diagnosing certain health problems among the citizenry." An earnest, fastidious self-flagellator constantly covered in feces, Cone suffers (both comically and not) for having an enormous penis and a pious mother who raised him to abhor it. Sanitation has come to take the place of eros and intimacy, and day after day he plunges his stick into the excrement of others, dreaming all the while of a gleaming world saved by indoor plumbing. Technology is the way out of pain. Progress and modernity are king. War is in full swing, chemical warfare and machine guns have come to the front, automobiles dazzle poor kids on the street, women are considered either whores or homemakers, homosexuals and African-Americans are attacked and degraded, citizens with "foreign-sounding" names are harassed and treated with suspicion. And as much as we'd like to take comfort in the thought that all of this happened far away and a century ago, the fact is that Pollock's funny, damning novel belongs, more than ever, to the country we live in now. An old-fashioned yarn that's also a jab at our hopeless faith in modernity. ALEXANDER MAKSIK is the author of the novels "You Deserve Nothing" and "A Marker to Measure Drift." His new novel, "Shelter in Place," will be published in September.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

Pollock (The Devil All the Time, 2011) sets this historical crime novel in 1917. It is largely the story of Georgia sharecropper Pearl Jewett and his sons, Cane, Cob, and Chimney. They're literally starving, living in a crumbling shack with a dirt floor, when Pearl dies. Only Cane, the oldest, can read, and the only book they own is a lurid pulp novel titled The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Buckets. So using Bloody Bill as a model, they set out to fill their bellies through robbery. But, in 24 hours, they are also murderers with a price on their heads. On their way to Canada, they fetch up in Meade, a small city in southern Ohio, where they encounter Ellsworth Fiddler and his wife, Eula. Ellsworth is a struggling small farmer who is unaware that the U.S. has entered a world war. And a strange tale gets even stranger. Think of The Heavenly Table as an antic, shambolic, guilty pleasure. Pollock's prose is compulsively readable and often very funny. Yes, the humor all seems to stem from sexual proclivities and excrement, but that's what makes the pleasure guilty.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

With furious prose and a Faulknerian eye for character, Pollock (The Devil All the Time) populates his second novel with dozens of memorable people who embody America's headlong leap toward the future in the early 20th century. In 1917, everything changes for the Jewett brothers-Cane, the capable one; Cob, the "slow" one; and Chimney, the hothead-upon their father's sudden ascension to the "heavenly table." With the exploits of their pulp fiction hero Bloody Bill Bucket fresh in their minds, the brothers embark on a violent journey north, escaping the backbreaking, fetid swamps on the Georgia-Alabama border and their lives under the thumb of sadistic landowner Maj. Thaddeus Tardweller. In southern Ohio, aging farmer Ellsworth Fiddler and his wife wait for their prodigal son to return home after a brief absence, during which he may or may not have enlisted in the United States Army to fight in Europe. Facing inexorable change-automobiles, airplanes, the machinery of war and agriculture-Ellsworth and others who frequent the local mercantile are "in agreement that the world now seemed head over heels in love with what tycoons and politicians kept referring to as 'progress.'" But the Fiddlers cannot fathom how their lives will be transformed when the Jewetts ride into town on a crime spree that has made them the most wanted men in the country. Set against the backdrop of America's involvement in WWI and the rise of motorized and electrical technology, Pollock's gothic, relentless imagination seduces readers into a fertile time in America's history, exploring the chaos, wonder, violence, sexuality, and ambition of a nation on the cusp of modernity-and the outmoded notion of redemption in a world gone to hell. Agent: Richard Pine and Nathaniel Jacks, Inkwell Management. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In 1917, after the death of their father, three dirt-poor Georgia brothers murder their employer, steal guns and horses, and embark on an epic crime spree. Cane, Cob, and Chimney Jewett cut a wide and bloody swath as they head north toward Canadathey even shoot down an airplane in one memorable scene. By the time they reach southeastern Ohio, there's a big bounty on their heads and a passel of slapdash posses on their trail, and the rap sheet of their legend includes not only the things they have done, but several they haven't (necrophilia, for instance). Finally they pause in southern Ohio, where they spend a few days recovering (one brother has been wounded) on the homestead of Ellsworth and Eula Fiddler, plain country folk who take them in for what turns out to be a rural idyll. Then, motivated by the desire to spend some of their ill-gotten gains on the high life, prostitutes, even a fast car, they move on to nearby Meade, a military-camp crossroads that's rough and chaotic and about to get even more so. This is in most ways pretty standard rural gothic, full of bright-hued mayhem and scatological wit, but Pollock (The Devil All the Time, 2011, etc.) brings way more flair and invention to the enterprise than most writers could. A darkly comic gorefest by a gifted writer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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In 1917, just as another hellish August was starting to come to an end along the border that divides Georgia and Alabama, Pearl Jewett awakened his sons before dawn one morning with a guttural bark that sounded more animal than man.   The three young men arose silently from their particular corners of the one-room shack and pulled on their filthy clothes, still damp with the sweat of yesterday's labors.   A mangy rat covered with scabs scuttled up the rock chimney, knocking bits of mortar into the cold grate.  Moonlight funneled through gaps in the chinked log walls and lay in thin milky ribbons across the red dirt floor.   With their heads nearly touching the low ceiling, they gathered around the center of the room for breakfast, and Pearl handed them each a bland wad of flour and water fried last night in a dollop of leftover fat.  There would be no more to eat until evening, when they would all get a share of the sick hog they had butchered in the spring, along with a mash of boiled spuds and wild greens scooped onto dented tin plates with a hand that was never clean from a pot that was never washed.  Except for the occasional rain, every day was the same.  "I seen me two of them niggers again last night," Pearl said, staring out the rough-cut opening that served as the only window.   "Out there a-sittin' in the tulip tree, singin' their songs.  They was really goin' at it."   According to the owner of the land, Major Thaddeus Tardweller, the last tenants of the shack, an extended family of mulattoes from Louisiana, had all died of the fever several years ago, and were buried out back in the weeds along the perimeter of the now empty hog pen.  Due to fears of the sickness lingering on in a place where black and white had mixed, he hadn't been able to convince anyone to live there until the old man and his boys came along last fall, half-starved and looking for work.  Lately, Pearl had been seeing their ghosts everywhere.  The morning before he'd counted five of them.  Gaunt and grizzled, with his mouth hanging open and the front of his trousers stained yellow from a leaky bladder, he looked as if any he might join them on the other side any minute.  He bit into his biscuit, then asked, "Did ye hear 'em?" "No, Pap," Cane, the oldest, said, "I don't think so."  At twenty-three, Cane was as close to being handsome as any sharecropper's son could hope to get, having inherited the best of both parents:  his father's tall, sinewy frame and his mother's well-defined features and thick, dark hair; but the harsh, hopeless way they lived was already starting to crinkle his face with fine lines and pepper his beard with gray.  He was the only one in the family who could read, having been old enough before his mother passed for her to teach him from her Bible and an old McGuffey borrowed from a neighbor; and strangers usually viewed him as the only one of the bunch who had any promise, or for that matter, any sense.  He looked down at the greasy glob in his hand, saw a curly white hair pressed into the dough with a dirty thumbprint.  This morning's ration was smaller than usual, but then he remembered telling Pearl yesterday that they had to cut back if they wanted the sack of flour to last until fall.  Pinching the hair loose from his breakfast, he watched it float to the floor before he took his first bite.  "Only thing I heard was that ol' rat runnin' around," Cob said.  He was the middle one, short and heavy-set, with a head round as a chickpea and watery green eyes that always appeared a little out of focus, as if he had just been clobbered with a two-by-four.  Though as stout as any two men put together, Cob had always been a bit on the slow side, and he got along mainly by following Cane's lead and not complaining too much, no matter how deep the shit, how small the biscuit.  Even telling time was beyond his comprehension.  He was, to put it bluntly, what people usually referred to in those days as a dummy.  You might come across such a man almost anywhere, sitting on his haunches around some town pump, hoping for a friendly howdy or handout from some good citizen passing by, someone with enough compassion to realize that but for the grace of God, it could just as easily be himself sitting there in that sad, ragged loneliness.  Truth be told, if it hadn't been for Cane looking out for him, that's probably how Cob would have ended up, living out his days on a street corner, begging for scraps and the occasional coin with a rusty bean can.  The old man waited a moment for the youngest to respond, then said, "What about you, Chimney?  Did ye hear 'em?" Chimney stood with a dazed look on his pimply, dirt-streaked face.  He was still thinking about the splay-toothed floozy with the fat tits that the old man's raspy squawk had chased away a few minutes ago.  Last night, as with most evenings whenever Pearl passed out on his blanket before it got too dark to see, Cane had read aloud to his brothers from The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket , a crumbling, water-stained dime novel that glorified the criminal exploits of an ex-Confederate soldier turned bank robber cutting a swath of terror throughout the old West.  Consequently, Chimney had spent the last few hours dreaming of gun fights on scorched desert plains and poontang that tasted like honey.  He glanced over at his brothers, yawning and scratching like a couple of dogs, eating what might as well have been lumps of clay and listening to that nutty bastard prattle on about his black buddies in the spirit world.  Of course, he could understand Cob buying Pearl's bullshit; there weren't enough brains in his head to fill a teaspoon.  But why did Cane continue to play along?  It didn't make any sense.  Hell, he was smarter than any of them.   Being loyal to any old mother or father was fine up to a point, Chimney reckoned, no matter how crazy or senile they had become, but what about their own selves?  When did they get to start living? "I'm talkin' to you, boy," Pearl said.  Chimney looked down at the shelf of greenish gray mold growing along the bottom of the cabin walls.  A simple yes or no wasn't going to cut it, not this morning.   Perhaps because he was the runt of the family, rebelliousness had always been the bigger part of his nature, and whenever he was in one of his defiant or pissed-off moods, the seventeen-year-old was liable to say or do anything, regardless of the consequences.   He thought again about the juicy wench in his dream, her dimpled ass and sultry voice already fading away, soon to be extinguished completely by the backbreaking misery of swinging an axe in another hundred degree day.  "Don't sound like no bad deal to me," he finally said to Pearl.  "Layin' around pickin' your teeth and playin' music.  Shit, why is it they get to have all the fun?" "What's that?" "I said the way things is goin' around this goddamn place, I'd trade even up with a dead darkie any day."  The room went quiet as the old man pulled his slumped shoulders back and tightened his mouth into a grim leer.  Clenching his fists, Pearl's first thought was to knock the boy to the floor, but by the time he turned away from the window, he'd already changed his mind.  It was too early in the morning to be drawing blood, even if it was justified.  Instead, he stepped closer to Chimney and studied his thin, triangular face and cold, insolent eyes.  Sometimes the old man almost found it hard to believe the boy was one of his own.  Of course, Cob had always been a disappointment, but at least he had a good heart and did what he was told, whereas Cane, well, only a fool would find fault with him.  Chimney, on the other hand, was impossible to figure out.  He might work like a dog one day and then refuse to hit a lick the next, no matter how much Pearl threatened him.  Or he might give Cob his share of the evening meal, then turn around and shit in his shoes while he was eating it.  It was as if he couldn't make up his mind between being good or evil, and so he tried his best to be both.  Not only that, he was woman-crazy, too, had been ever since he first found out his pecker would get hard.  And he didn't give a damn who knew it either; you could hear him jerking it over there in his blanket two or three times every night, especially if Cane had read to him again from that goddamn book they treasured like a holy relic.  Pearl thought about something he had once heard an auctioneer say at a livestock sale, about how when the stud gets older, the litters get weaker, not only in the body, but in the head, too.  "Don't just go for your animals either," the man said.  "Had an old boy back home caught him a young wife and decided at fifty-nine he wanted to bring one more of his own into the world before he dried up for good.  Poor thing was born one of them maniacs like they got locked up in the nuthouse over in Memphis."  "What happened to it?' Pearl had asked. "Sold it to some banana man down in South America who collects such things," the auctioneer replied.  Back then, Pearl had dismissed the notion as part of some sales pitch to run the bidding up on a pair of young bulls, but now he realized there might be some truth in it.  Though he hated to admit it, from the looks of things, his seed had already lost some of its vigor when he and Lucille made Cob, and by the time he shot Chimney into the oven, it had gone from slightly tepid to downright sour.  Even so, perhaps because he was the youngest or had yet to grow the scraggly beard his brothers wore, Chimney was still the one that reminded Pearl of his dead wife the most.  He leaned closer and stared into the boy's eyes even more intently, as if he were peering into a smoky portal to the past.  Chimney looked over at his brothers again, took the last bite of his biscuit.  The old man's breath reeked of stomach gas and rancid drippings.  A solitary bird began to twitter from somewhere close by, and suddenly Pearl was recalling a long ago night when he had walked Lucille home from a barn dance just a few weeks before they married.  The autumn sky was glittering with stars, and a faint smell of honeysuckle still hung in the cool air.  He could hear the gravel crunching beneath their feet.  Her face appeared before him, as young and pretty as the first time he ever saw her, but just as he was getting ready to reach out and touch her cheek, Chimney shattered the spell.  "Hell, yes," he said, "maybe we should ask them niggers if they'd be a-willin' to--" Without any warning, Pearl's hand whipped out and caught the boy by the throat.  "Spit it out," he growled.  "Spit it out."  Chimney tried to break away, but the old man's grip, seasoned by years of plowing and chopping and picking, was tight as a vise.  With his windpipe squeezed shut, he soon ceased struggling and managed to spew a few wet crumbs from his mouth that stuck to the hairs on Pearl's wrist.  "Pap, he didn't mean nothing," Cane said, moving toward the two.  "Let him go."  Though he figured his brother probably deserved getting the shit choked out of him, if for no other reason than being a constant aggravation, Cane also knew that getting their father too upset this early in the morning meant that he would push them twice as hard in the field today, and it was tough enough working a slow pace when you had but one biscuit to run on.  "I'm sick of his mouth," Pearl said through clenched teeth.  Then he snorted some air and tightened his hold even more, seemingly resolved on shutting the boy up forever.  "I said let him go, goddamn it," Cane repeated, just before he grabbed the old man's other arm and wrenched it behind his back with a violent twist that filled the room with a loud pop.  Pearl let out a piercing howl as he shoved Chimney away and jerked free of Cane.  The boy coughed and spat out the rest of his biscuit onto the floor, and they all watched in the gloomy half-light as the old man ground it into the dirt with his shoe while working the hurt out of his shoulder.  Nothing else was said.  Even Chimney was temporarily out of words.  When he was done, they all followed Pearl out of the shack single file.  Cob stopped at the well and drew a pail of water, and they carried it, together with their tools--three double-headed axes and a couple of machetes and a rusty saber with a broken tip--along the edge of a long green cotton field.  As the sun crested the hills to the east, looking like the bloodshot eye of a hung-over barfly, they came to a swampy piece of acreage they were clearing for Major Tardweller.  He had promised them a bonus of ten laying hens if they finished the job in six weeks, and Cane figured they might just make it at the rate they were going.  He peeled off his ragged shirt and draped it over the top of the canvas bucket to keep the gnats and mosquitoes out, and another day of work began.  By afternoon, with nothing but warm water sloshing around in their guts, all they could think about was that sick hog hanging in the smokehouse. Excerpted from The Heavenly Table: A Novel by Donald Ray Pollock All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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