It’s sort of hard to know where to start with Donald Ray Pollock’s upcoming collection Knockemstiff, which Doubleday’s releasing in just more than a month. The first and easiest point of awesomeness is: that name? Knockemstiff? Real town. In Ohio. No shit.
For sure the thing that’s going to just take everyone’s head off regarding this book is how fucking unbelievably good the stories within are. Hyperbole’s cheap as tinsel, and I’m as cagey and cautious around it as the next worn-down, hoping-desperately-for-something-great reader. Here’s the big problem, though: Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection really is just fucking incredible. There aren’t that many ways to parse it: the book’s solid and terrifying and funny and sad and huge-hearted and the writing’s enough to either knock you out of your chair or, more likely, glue your damned ass so tight into your chair that you won’t get up until you’ve finished it (full disclosure: I received the book on a Wednesday afternoon at 1:30pm, had read half of it by 4pm, and finished it (after returning from evening obligations) at 2am. Total reading time: 4 hours. Total time actually felt: about fifteen minutes).
Reading Pollock elicited a feeling similar to the one I get whenever I read the real big greats: Lorrie Moore or Tobias Wolff or Ron Carlson or Aimee Bender (there are more, and that’s not at all to compare him to any of them, but those are the first four I can think of). I’d finish a story, find myself exhaling more than I felt was necessary (and then realizing that I’d been holding my breath), and I’d ask, bewildered, how the fuck did he do that? There’s never really an answer to the question (and, let’s face it: part of the magic of stories is that there’s, real simply, magic) but here are some of the ingredients Pollock’s cooking with:
1. You know those great stories you get told every once in awhile by people who know a story inside and out? How, just in the telling of a simple story, you get ancillary details of all this other stuff—you get the river itself, the story, but you also get a little bit of each of the tributaries that flow into the river and make the story what it is? Pollock’s a fucking master at this. Every character in this book—every character that’s even just named, in passing—is so real you feel like you could smell each one of them. There’s not a moment in which any of the characters—even the cheapest, most doomed and fucked of them—feel flat or simple or, that worst fate, put in the book only as adjectival/cliched prop (the bactine-huffing idiot, the crazy woman who carries fish sticks in her purse). Each of these characters is so, so much more than the sum of their telling traits. (I could go on and on about this. Knockemstiff, Ohio is a tough place (in this book, perhaps in real life, I don’t know), and almost every character within is all sorts of damaged. Abusive parents, drug problems, rampant drinking—these are tip-of-the-iceberg aspects. And not once is any of these characters trotted out for the snide, coastal and superior reader to chuckle derisively at—none of these characters is a them, is some grotesque other. It’s common praise, but it’s fucking hard to do, and it’s rare as anything, and Pollock’s gift for generosity and empathy seems pretty well limitless (which gets into a whole other thing about authors and their fiction, parts of which argument stretch back to Zadie Smith’s two-part essay in the Guardian last March or February or whenever, but let me say this: if Donald Ray Pollock’s as kind and humble and generous a person as he is an author, we should all desperately hope for a friend even one tenth as good as he seems likely to be).
2. Oh fucking hell, these sentences. At random:
“She began emitting a high-pitched squeal that sounded like an ambulance rushing down the highway looking for something to feed upon. Del backed away and waited for the inevitable crash.” (“Fish Sticks”)
“She ate a doughnut and wondered what it would be like to live in the desert. Everything there would be new. She could go on a diet and Dean could get his head dried out. They could do whatever people do who live in the sand.” (“Rainy Sunday”)
“The Shady Glen Church of Christ in Christian Union sits only a couple hundred yards away from the store, and I wake up every Sunday morning to the crying and clamoring of people who fear God.” (“Knockemstiff”)
See?
3. Stuff happens in these stories. Fights. Drinking. Sexual confusion. Carlson does this better than anyone I read, but Pollock’s a close second: shit’s happening in almost every sentence. I can recall very few paragraphs in the book that are simply emotional exposition exercises.
4. This sort of goes back to the (wildly wandering, overwrought) first point, but each of these stories feels true. There’s much redemption here, but never does it feel anything but tempered by just the worst sorts of fire. There’s a a wonderful lack of if/then in this book—meaning that, like life, shit happens and, sometimes, shit just keeps happening. Some very good people get just screwed mercilessly. Some bad people get away with way more than they should. But Pollock gets us right up close to those transactions, gets us (me, anyway) closer than we might wish ourselves and, without judgment, without explanation, just lets things be. If that sounds easy, try writing a story that’s got even a trace of morality, and then try not to beat the reader over the head with that morality. (again: see?)
I could keep going. I should keep going. Want to know maybe my favorite part of Donald Ray Pollock? He’s not some young, tough kid looking to prove anything. Where I’m from it’s inappropriate to speak of people’s ages, but dig this: in the acknowledgments, DRPollock mentions two granddaughters. DEBUT BOOK. BY A GRANDFATHER. Anyone who thinks slush piles are meaningless and large corporations heartless and without a concern for anything other than the next cutely-groomed mid-20’s ivy leaguer with a thinly-veiled first-person debut novel (or collection of stories) is just wrong.
This is an almost flawless book. If there’s anything wrong with it at all, it’s that it’s over too soon. Fair warning: the book seems like it’s going to get pushed as one of two things: either as something for the young/tough/male set (fans of: Palahniuk, T. Jones, etc) or for fans of the terse, dirty country stuff of, say, Carver or O’Connor. Please, please know: it’s not for either of those subsets. Or, better: it’s for those two groups in congruence with the larger, bigger, more important group, which is: the group of people who want to read shatteringly good short stories about how it feels to be alive. You want something to hope for? Hope Donald Ray Pollock writes more, again, soon.
