We have Ellsworth Fiddler, a swindled farmer trying to save face, Jasper Cone, a painfully afflicted sanitation inspector, Lieutenant Bovard, a jilted husband turned homoerotic (would be) war hero, and finally the luckless Jewett brothers, Cane, Cob and Chimney, who grow tired of the poor life and turn to robbing banks as a path to salvation. The narrative is snappy and unsettled, the short chapters jumping between various locations and points of view, slowly drawing inwards in an inescapable ring which corrals the characters into the inevitable finale at the town of Meade. While Donald Ray Pollock’s latest novel, The Heavenly Table, takes us back to the 1917, it’s still rooted in the area of America he is making his own. This style was developed (and potentially mastered) with Devil All The Time, his debut novel which cast the reader into world in which the membrane between reality and nightmare is leaky at best, with blood sacrifice and serial killer couples complicating an already bleak coming-of-age tale. As bizarre as it is violent, Knockemstiff introduced the literary world to small town Southern Ohio populated by every drunk, deviant and freak you would care to imagine.īut somehow, amidst the drugs and fighting and perversion, Pollock managed to create characters interesting beyond black curiosity, taking up the mantle of Southern greats such as William Gay and Flannery O’Connor in his ability to induce sympathy or at least complicate the antipathy his characters will garner.
However, at forty-five he picked up a pen and began to write, at fifty enrolled in an English programme at Ohio State University and had a collection of short stories snaffled up by Doubleday before he finished his studies. Raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio, Donald Ray Pollock worked at the local paper mill, just like his father and grandfather before him.
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