Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock
(Doubleday) $22.95.
For quite some time, Harry Crews wrote nasty novels—The
Gospel Singer, A Feast of Snakes—about Florida and the
South. The amoral bodybuilders that tended to be protagonists of his
stories did drugs, fornicated, and committed heinous acts of violence
like it was their biological imperative. The characters in
Knockemstiff could be their Ohioan kissing cousins.
Pollock’s debut collection of linked stories takes place in the very
real town of Knockemstiff, Ohio (Pollock’s hometown), and some of the
drug abuse (huffing Bactine, taking fistfuls of unidentified pills) and
lawlessness (burglary, abuse, car theft) is based on real events.
Pollock doesn’t quite have Crews’s pitch-perfect cadence and snaky
prose, but he has a real, solid talent, and an ability to write about
poor small-town residents (without making them either saints or
reptiles) that diminishes most debut authors by association.
The language is relentless: “He coughed and spit a gob of thick
poisonous snot”; “I listen to my son try to swallow his tongue and go
over the whole fucking mess for the thousandth time”; “Dropping to his
knees, he grabbed the man’s glasses and snapped them in two, beat him
in the face until a tooth popped through one meaty cheek.” But there’s
a dirty gorgeousness under all the smear and soot, and from the ugly
dignity of “Assailants” to the elegy of “Honolulu,” this book doesn’t
wander into the darkness just to be a tourist. It begins in darkness
and remains there, to stay, because it feels comfortable.
Paul Constant interviews Donald Ray
Pollock on working in a
paper mill for
decades, learning how to write by
retyping
Hemingway stories, and the
alluring quality of luncheon meat
here.