Other literary forms

Donald Ray Pollock has published poems in River Styx and other journals and is a frequent contributor on politics in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Huffington Post. He also keeps a blog, Notes from the Holler. He has been working on a novel set in 1965, about a serial killer named Arvin Eugene Russell.

Achievements

Donald Ray Pollock is the recipient of the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, an award that honors a talented fiction writer whose debut suggests great things to come and that carries a $35,000 cash prize. Pollock also won the 2009 Devil’s Kitchen Award in Prose from the University of southern Illinois, Carbondale.

Biography

Donald Ray Pollock was born in a holler named Knockemstiff and raised in Ohio, and he has lived his entire adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio. He worked in a paper mill in Chillicothe until he was fifty and then left when he enrolled in Ohio State University’s M.F.A. creative-writing program. While a student at Ohio State, Pollock, having the ability to write full time, cranked out stories that seemed to have been building up inside of him for years. He finished Knockemstiff, a linked story collection reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) in subject matter (if not always in tone and delivery), and it was published by Doubleday in 2008. The book received mostly positive reviews and garnered Pollock comparisons to Breece D’J Pancake, William Gay, Chris Offutt, and Larry Brown. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club (1996) and other novels, raved about Pollock’s debut, giving Pollock a sort of cult following. While at Ohio State, Pollock also served as a New York Times political correspondent during the 2008 presidential election, in which Barack Obama was elected.

Little has been written about Pollock to this point, and whatever information is out there must be pieced together from interviews. In a 2009 interview for Sycamore Review, Pollock discussed his writing habits, his key influences, and the midlife crisis that forced him to quit work at the paper mill and enroll in a creative-writing program. Pollock talked about his early influences, such as classic noir films of the 1940’s and 1950’s, and he also credited Andrew Porter’s The Theory of Light and Matter (2008), because the book gave him the idea to do a linked story cycle. In an interview with Hobart, Pollock said that he learned to write by typing out his favorite stories from authors he greatly admired: Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Denis Johnson, Sam Lipsyte, and Flannery O’Connor. He also credited Tom Franklin, Tobias Wolff, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Dawn Powell as major influences. Pollock’s work has been published in Third Coast, The Journal, Sou’wester, Chiron Review, River Styx, Boulevard, Folio, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and other magazines and journals.

Analysis

Donald Ray Pollock burst onto the literary scene in 2008, a fifty-four-year-old ex-paper mill worker with a debut that was part Sherwood Anderson and part Charles Bukowski. Raw and wild, Knockemstiff (2008) was a book that immediately stood out in a field of other new works by “sophisticated” writers from top-tier writing programs. Pollock’s voice seemed unhinged, genuine to the bone, and Pollock was certainly not your typical M.F.A. graduate. His experiences in Ohio had given him the stuff for a solid book. Unlike other writers who try to exploit the blue-collar angle, especially young writers who work a few factory jobs and then write stories or a novel about their rough experiences, Pollock had worked in the real world for almost thirty years. Thus, it was a relief to find that there was no posturing in Knockemstiff. Pollock is not a poseur; he is the literary descendant of such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay.

Pollock has in common with Gay and Breece D’J Pancake a deep concern for the hard and lonely world of Appalachian rural poverty. Pollock’s fiction sets itself apart from other attempts to portray backwoods characters living the hard life because of his grim and spare prose and his ability to check his feelings at the door. Pollock is not trying to make a broad political statement, and he is not speaking about the problems of society as a whole; instead, he is focused on presenting with a loving brushstroke accurate portraits of broken or damaged men and women. Pollock cares for and knows his characters. They are in no way a merely a tool.

The eighteen stories in Knockemstiff feature a broad variety of characters, but the setting is not the only reason Pollock’s book is considered a linked story cycle. Thematic continuity abounds in Pollock’s world of isolation and loneliness. All of the characters have been defeated in some way, shape, or form. They are broke. Education has failed them. They live a life that is rough around the edges and filled with empty experiences. They swear. They are lonely. They are overcome with grief. They are, like the characters in the fiction of Gay and Pancake, not set up to make it in the modern world. Broken, they wander, seeking relief in booze, drugs, violence, and detached sex. They seek revenge for wrongs that have been committed against them. Many of Pollock’s characters wind up failing, losing their health, their jobs, and their memory. They die or they live a life that is worse than death. Pollock’s vision is complicated and sad, tragic and beautiful all at once. His characters undergo suffering and trauma, often for no apparent reason. Like O’Connor’s antiheroes and antagonists, Pollock’s characters are displaced in a world that will not have them.

“Real Life”

Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection gets a kick-start with the first story, “Real Life.” If the story operates in the terrain of writers such as Gay and Pancake, it also inhabits territory covered by Bukowski in works such as Ham on Rye (1982). A twist on the conventional coming-of-age story, “Real Life” chronicles a father’s attempts to make his son a man through exposure to violence. The boy, Bobby, exists in a world that seems to be always on the verge of falling apart. Violence or the threat of it is everywhere. His ignorant, drunken father, Vernon, is the worst kind of example, and he is dead set on passing down to his son a legacy of violent and irrational behavior. A good kid at heart, Bobby protests, but he is swayed to have a false epiphany after his father congratulates Bobby for attacking the son of the man that Vernon has just beaten to a pulp in the bathroom of a drive-in theater. Vernon is strangely proud of his son, and Bobby is infected with a desire for more praise from his old man and for more blood.

Pollock’s dissection of humankind’s violent nature is in full effect. Vernon is a typical antiexemplar: hungry for blood, irrational, ignorant, bad to the core. Bobby is the kind of character with whom Pollock is concerned: a boy who must overcome the odds in the face of exposure to such mindless violence and random cruelty. At the center of Pollock’s work is a deep sense of pity for boys such as Bobby, who have to learn to know better on their own, who have no adult to guide them to good behavior. Pollock is also deeply preoccupied with violence against the innocent. Evil takes many forms in Pollock’s book, but perhaps none more sinister than a character such as Vernon, who lashes out unprompted against a fellow human and beats him within an inch of his life.

“Pills”

“Pills” is a story in which Robert “Bobby” Shaffer tells about an adventure from his youth. When he was sixteen, he and his buddy Frankie stole four bottles of pharmaceutical amphetamines from a bartender-drug dealer in town. They had planned on taking Frankie’s car and splitting town, hoping to drive all the way to California and hide out, but instead they wind up sticking around Knockemstiff. The story chronicles their misadventures in light of the pill theft, which left them high for five days straight,. Like Pancake, Pollock is concerned with characters who see a better life for themselves somewhere else. Escape is the goal, and Bobby and Frankie fantasize about a better existence outside of their small holler. However, the fact that the story is narrated by Bobby as a middle-aged man indicates Pollock’s larger message: There is no escape from the self. One either starts living where one is or ones does not live at all.

Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is often (some would may mistakenly) read as a “revolt from the village” story cycle. The same could be said of Pollock’s Knockemstiff, and “Pills” is a prime example of how the imaginations of characters stuck in small-town life begin to wander. At the end of the story, Bobby recalls looking up and seeing a plane flying overhead. He wonders if the people up there can see the fire he and Frankie have going, and he wonders what they would think of them. There is always the promise and the fear of what is happening in the larger world. Pollock’s characters are trapped in Knockemstiff, but they would be trapped anywhere; they are trapped within themselves.

“Schott’s Bridge”

“Schott’s Bridge” is another story that ties Pollock’s collection to Winesburg, Ohio. Like Anderson, Pollock is confused by and concerned with small-town hypocrisy and narrowness. Todd Russell, an alienated gay man, befriends Frankie Johnson (the same character from “Pills”), a homophobic roughneck. Todd, wanting only to love Frankie, misjudges him, and Frankie lashes out. One of Pollock’s most violent and disturbing stories, “Schott’s Bridge” chronicles Frankie’s brutal destruction of Todd. He beats and rapes him and then steals his car and money. Todd, seemingly left with nothing, contemplates jumping off Schott’s Bridge.

This story is further evidence of Pollock’s abiding concern with outsiders and outcasts. Like Wing Biddlebaum in Anderson’s “Hands,” Todd is someone who does not seem to fit in the place where he lives. He seeks only trust and love, but he is thwarted at every turn by hatred and narrowness. Pollock’s sympathy for this character is evident as Todd stands on Schott’s Bridge above the water, considering death. Instead of jumping, he throws a cigarette into the water and decides to try life, no matter how awful and difficult it is.

“Assailants”

Another tale that deals with detached and displaced characters, “Assailants” tells the story of Geraldine Murray, the wife of Del Murray. Geraldine is a notable character in Knockemstiff because she carries fish sticks around in her purse and because, after being assaulted and nearly killed in a horrifying encounter outside of a tobacco shop, she has become an agoraphobic prone to panic attacks. The man who victimized her wore a paper bag over his head. She is dismissed as an eccentric and oddball, and Del must deal with the attitude that the townsfolk have toward her. When he flirts with a young female clerk at a local shop, he is somehow upset by the girl’s dismissal of Geraldine as a flake. To give validity to Geraldine’s story, he decides to rob the store, with a paper bag over his head, where the young female clerk works. Unfortunately, he is too convincing. He scares the girl and she trips and falls, hitting her head, perhaps fatally. Violence is visited upon yet another innocent character in Pollock’s world. More than that, Pollock is concerned with how violence begets violence, with how bad acts have a stone-thrown-in-the-lake effect, with consequences rippling out in all directions.

“I Start Over”

“I Start Over” is another story that signifies Pollock’s immersion in the world of the displaced and the lonely. It also examines the violent effects of being an outcast in society. Bernie Givens, a big, sloppy man, doomed to a tragic life, cannot deal with his son’s fate: The son has been damaged permanently after a seventy-two-hour binge on booze and drugs. Bernie will not accept his grief and takes it out on a coworker; as a result, Bernie is fired from his job. Things fall apart after that. Bernie turns suicidal and then homicidal. He assaults some teenagers who mock him and then goes on the lam. The story ends with him on the run, pursued by the police, jail or death very real possibilities and the only ways that Bernie can truly start over. Pollock’s fascination with the crumbling life is evident. The son’s mistakes are visited upon the father, just as the father’s mistakes are eternally visited upon the son. Pollock’s world is dark and lonesome, brutal and hard, and there is the real sense that even the strongest, most agile human being can be rendered impotent and useless at any given moment.

Bibliography