Knockemstiff
February 7, 2009
Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday, $22.95. In paperback March 10.
**** out of *****
Sometimes it’s hard to feel sorry for people who end up living awful existences when they repeatedly make awful choices. But there’s no hemming and hawing among the characters in Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories.
A fictional representation of Pollock’s real-life hometown (named for a nasty fight outside the church), the easy out would be to call it a gritty, redneck Winesburg, Ohio.
But there is no easy out in a town like Knockemstiff.
Most everybody has designs to leave, but they all end up back in the holler. Over and over, Pollock puts their backs up against the wall. It’s eighteen stories span thirty years of the town, who’s characters are seldom, if ever, upstanding people. In “Real Life,” a father pummels a man in a drive-in restroom so viciously his teeth punch through his cheek, then makes his 7-year-old son beat the hell out of his victim’s boy. In “Blessed,” the narrator falls off a roof during a burglary and can’t feel his legs, and his partner kicks him onto the hospital parking lot, where his painkiller addiction starts. In “Lard,” teenagers give the fattest kid in Knockemstiff bong hits in exchange for letting them throw darts at his stomach.
The characters may not be upstanding, but they certainly are people, and Pollock puts us in their shoes; reading story after story involving drug use and violence and abject poverty leaves you with a visceral feeling of being trapped. That’s no small feat. You may not like the characters in the book, and you may not want to spend time with them, but among the depravity, they become real. Pollock writes with prose so authentic, so tight and engaging that you root for them even when they’re despicable, and that’s what keeps the pages turning.
