I've been in a slowed reading pattern again. This time it's not a result of being busy at work or occupied at home. Instead it's because I picked up Donald Ray Pollock's collection Knockemstiff. Not that there's anything remotely difficult about the prose, but what you have are plots and characters that are the literary equivalent of bottom-shelf vodka. Every story is like a shot that will burn you a new one going down but in the end, once a few shots have been forced down, you start to get the same feeling that you would from the top-shelf stuff. But it's not something, the collection or the vodka, that I'm comfortable finishing in one sitting.
Sorry to sound so vague but it's the best way I know how to describe it at this point. I'll have more when I can get through the whole book. Has anyone else read Knockemstiff? Comments?
By the way, I do recommend the book highly. It is an impressive debut from someone who has spent most of his 40-something years as a factory worker. There's a lot of parallels that one can draw to Larry Brown here. You can tell that a lot of these characters have been inside his head for a while. And the stories, well, there's stuff that would make Palahniuk blush.
This is the opening paragraph of "Hair's Fate" from Knockemstiff:
When people in town said inbred, what they really meant was lonely. Daniel liked to pretend that anyway. He needed the long hair. Without it, he was nothing but a creep country stooge from Knockemstiff, Ohio--old-people glasses and acne sprouts and a bony chicken chest. You ever try to be someone like that? When you're fourteen, it's worse than being dead. And so when the old man sawed off Daniel's hair with a butcher knife, the same one his mom used to slice rings of red bologna and scrape the pig's jowl, he might as well have cut the boy's head off, too.
It's an incredible book to my mind. It just keeps punching the reader over and over though, so understandable that you're taking some time with it.
Posted by: Dan Wickett | June 13, 2008 at 04:06 PM