Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
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Book Reviews of Knockemstiff
Book Review: Trailer trash elevated to literary fiction
Summary: 3 Stars
Depravity doesn't get top billing these days in the world of fiction. But that word fits Pollock's stories, gritty male-oriented fodder, a welcome relief from the dominance of fiction catering to female reader sensibilities. This is trailer trash descending a few notches you didn't think it had, and Pollock has managed not only elevate it to a high art, but has gotten much aclaim for doing so.
No question these stories are tightly written and keep pumping like a hypodermic needle that refuses to leave the vein. However, after I read a few, I was finding it difficult to distinguish them. As a "core" story, Pollock has hit a refreshing bullseye. But as a collection, they kind of miss the mark. Still, it's great to know that "out there' stuff like this is out there.
Book Review: Sad, Depressing and Funny
Summary: 3 Stars
An unusual collection of inter-connected short stories imbued with humorous accounts of an underclass American social group. Beneath the humor is a sharp pang of sadness and pity which is both disconcerting and refreshing. The author, himself, in something of a miracle, appears to have transcended economically deprived circumstances to bring this disturbing work to fruition.Book Review: lack of range
Summary: 2 Stars
Pollock's prose is excellent and often laugh-out-loud funny, but he keeps telling the same story over and over. I have no problem reading about damaged people, but was there a single father in the town who was anything other than an alcoholic bully? Anyone who could get through the day without booze and pills? I kept waiting for that one story that would offer a modicum of redemption, but it never came. Someone compared Pollock to Larry Brown, but Brown's stories have a sliver of hope. All Pollock does is show us these sad souls and leave us to shake our heads.Book Review: Horrorshow
Summary: 1 Stars
The stories are so dull precisely because they are so utterly predictable. There is violence, stupidity, no introspection, and no real dialogue between characters- yes, even the working class debates real issues that affect them. They are not fascinating because the characters are not complex. Watching a retard suck his toe is not fascinating- gross; but dull, not fascinating. And, in the eighteen tales that comprised the collection, I knew, with almost no variance, how each and every tale would end. The reason? Because the stories are so cookie cutter formulaic. I have seen hundreds of bad tales like this on the Internet, dozens in writing workshops, and can say, without fear of contradiction, that there are likely fifty to a hundred thousand Donald Ray Pollocks enrolled in MFA writing programs across the country at any given moment. How this rube got the connections or luck to `make it' in such a `competitive' field is the real question.
All in all, the book rates about a 40 out of 100, with the second half a little bit better than the first, a 50 vs. a 30 of 100. That's because three or four of the later tales have a brief moment where a good writer may have salvaged the tale into something passable, but where the rote, banal, and formulaic Pollock simply can only let his ragged tale's inertia draw him to the most obvious ends. Also, there are a few minor hints that Pollock might be capable of learning something of story structure, or even have some rudimentary impulses that go beyond the predictable in these later tales. Yet, it's so fleeting, for the book never coheres as a work of singularity nor substance, never establishes a rationale, beyond its location.
Pollock is all too depressingly real as a representative of all that is wrong with published fiction today- a bad and generic writer (although, to be fair, he is a better writer than Dave Eggers or James Frey, and just a notch below TC Boyle) who gets published because of connections and the blurbery of a bad, but celebrated, writer, and then gets a plethora of Amazon `buzz reviews' from friends.
Yet, at the end of the book there is not a character, a line, nor a moment that sticks with the reader. And even though I saw every tales' end coming from within the first page (something dull, dumb, both, or nothing at all), within a day or two the tales' narratives had totally vanished from my mind. I Post-it noted the tales as I read lest I would have totally forgotten all but three or four of the tales' arcs. There is no surrealism afoot, no wit, no real grittiness- just undisciplined, sloppy, yet predictable stories about cardboard cutout characters that simply cannot exist in large numbers in one place. It's sort of the inverse of what a daytime soap opera does- put a bunch of wealthy, attractive people in one place, where they all share each others' beds and foibles. Are there losers such as Pollock writes of? Of course, but there are one or two in each small town, not dozens upon dozens, and even the unemployed or overweight will dialogue with themselves. It will not reach Shakespearean soliloquizing, but it is far richer and genuine than this degrading, sex-obsessed (sex featured includes that with retards, children, siblings, parents, old men, inanimate objects, fetishism, homosexuality, and- well, we are spared bestiality and necrophilia), and worse- ill written, tripe. Like the puerile filmmaker, Tim Burton, or like a male Mary Gaitskill, Pollock is constitutionally incapable of subtlety, and overdoes the oddities to the point of weariness. Along with all the aforementioned flaws is the knowledge that these repeated and multiple failures all point the way to the inescapable fact that Pollock is simply a very bad writer, not a writer of promise, potential, nor talent, who just has an annoying flaw or two.
Book Review: Bad Rap
Summary: 1 Stars
Knockemstiff
I am a former resident of Black Run Road (Knockemstiff). During my nine years in this village, I became acquained with MANY salt of the earth people. They were family oriented hard working citizens. Fathers worked at the Mead Paper Company or perhaps were involved in the very difficult and dangerous job of cutting paper wood to be used by the paper mill. Mothers worked hard and raised fine upstanding citizens.
I was excited to see that someone had written a book about Knockemstiff. I anticipated reading about the beautiful October hills of southern Ohio and the colorful legends of how Mitchell Flats and Punkin (not pumpkin) Center got their names.
Needless to say, when I finally got a copy of Knockemstiff, I was appalled to read the unsavory situations and extremely objectionable language it contains. I understand that Mr. Pollock states that this is fiction, but the implication is that since he grew up in this village he has first hand knowledge of the crude lifestyles he describes.
I drive through the village when I am in the area and can't help but notice the way the area has grown and the comfortable modern homes that now line Black Run Road. I'm sure these residents are fine upstanding citizens as were the people I knew in my nine years. I am writing to express empathy to these people who have been painted with such a dirty brush.
I wanted to rate this no stars, but that is not an option.