Patrick Reinken's Blog: Writing to Write - Posts Tagged "jon-clinch"

Kings of the Earth by Jon Clinch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In a book, playing with time is a kind of magic trick.

If it’s done poorly, we don’t believe. We see the dove that’s up the sleeve, the different sizes of playing cards in that deck, the fake feet on the woman who’s cut in half. And we don’t blink or wonder or feel amazed.

But if it’s done well – if it’s done in a way that doesn’t reveal the trickery in the trick – then we see a reality that's different from ours. The rabbit materializes from thin air, the man teleports, the lady does vanish. And we do blink and wonder and feel amazed.

In that instance, in that single moment of how’d they do that, we’re not truly focused on how they did that. We’re just reveling in the fact that we’ve seen some event in an entirely different way – from a position where the limitations of our view have constructed a scene not otherwise available to us, and that therefore carries the possibility of both misperception and insight.

Kings of the Earth, by Jon Clinch, is a magic trick.

Superbly written, it tells the story – both singular and collective – of the Proctor brothers, who live their lives in squalor and apparent general contentment on an upstate New York farm. From their background as children raised by a distant and abusive father and an adored mother, all the way through the decades-later death of one brother and the ramifications that flow from that, Kings in its author’s hands unfolds as a series of observations by, vignettes about, and reporting on the characters in these brothers’ lives. A sort of murder mystery and modern tragedy and character/culture study rolled into one, it comes with jumps in time, point of view changes in both character and voice, and chapters that vary from multiple pages down to a single perfect sentence. Throughout all that, it is vivid and encompassing in its creations of story and setting and people.

Some may criticize that approach as adding complexity, of making the book’s telling more difficult. That’s certainly their right. Different people read a given book differently, and they carry their perspectives into it and out of it. We all have our worlds, we all have our viewpoints, and we all have our reads on things.

For me, though, Clinch’s approach is compelling in its additions. That’s because of the point above – we all see and experience and describe things uniquely, and the shifting times and points of view reveal and emphasize one of the book’s key lessons: “I thought it was the strangest thing, how a person can go through this life and not see what you see. How he can stand right next to you and it’s all different.”

Some also may criticize the book in a belief it lacks resolution. That it fails to wrap up and tell “who did it.”

That one’s not accurate.

To be sure, the writing is subtle. Again like a magic trick, it’s folded together precisely and tightly. It’s tucked and fitted over itself, and any seams that exist in the way it’s pulled together are neatly stitched, almost to the point where they’re invisible.

But the “who did it” is resolved. The answer to that question can be found, as the author himself has suggested in a Kings discussion board posting here on Goodreads.

And I’ll argue the resolution isn’t the point, anyway. The point, at least to me, is the depiction of the world of these three brothers, who lived their lives in ways you or I might not understand or choose, but who were satisfied and content with the existence they had.

That’s because it was their world. It was their viewpoint. So it didn’t matter that someone might stand right next to them and see it and judge it all differently.



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