Pollock!
Donald Ray Pollock blew my mind massively almost now four years back on the release of his story collection Knockemstiff, stories for which the term gritty's almost comically simplistic (interview I did with him from that time right here). Here's what I can remember as clearly as anything else: an alcoholic in one story rubbing the nub of his distended liver, which was poking out from his torso, forming a bump on hi skin, a fact I've assumed is truly possible though I've made no effort to verify such gruesomeness. There are other distinct moments of the book's stories I recall, though what's been lastingly significant about the thing is less the specifics and more the feel of the thing. You've likely already read something that comes close to the Pollockian feeling in fiction—if you've read Woodrell, you've got a sense of it (though), ditto Frank Bill—and, happily, for those of us with the good taste to appreciate it, Pollock's style seems of late to be getting a foothold (seen Justified? Sure, that's Leonard, and it's funnier than Pollock's stuff, but that hilly thriller stuff—the middle-south world of Kentucky and Tennessee, West Virginia and southern Indiana and Ohio—seems to be catching on more and more).
What Pollock absolutely excells at is a sort of righteous awfulness. In this, of course, he's working terrain also covered by a different voice: McCarthy, Cormac. There's a scary but amazing lack, in all of Pollock's stuff, of moralizing: folks do terrible, terrible things, and badness ends up often just as punished (or barely, or un-) as good stuff. This happens: the child orphaned by his dad's suicide, or the other child orphaned by her mother's murder (at the hands of her father). These things happen.
In the briefest sketches, The Devil All the Time is the story of Arvin Russell—he's the one orphaned by his dad's suicide (which suicide transpires shortly after the agonizing death, by cancer, of his wife Charlotte [a woman Willard, the dad, meets literally on the busride back to his hometown after WWII, meets her at a coffee shop, and you should be aware early on that the sweetest, most tender relationship in this book—the one seemingly built off inevitability and fate, stars and all that—is so gruesomely snuffed so early on there's no way to not catch some slight whiff of certain structural impossibilities in Pollock's world—basically that such innocence hasn't heat or meat enough to last against badness's throttling]), and he's the one we track as he grows up with his grandmother and uncle, and he's the one we track as he rights the wrongs he's able to. He rights wrongs pretty mercilessly himself, yes (the bodycount in this book is in the double digits, though most of them aren't Arvin's doing), but you cannot stop rooting for him—there's this righteousness that Pollock so perfectly nails, and Arvin's ultimately an innocent who, in learning some of the world's darker depths, has to stick his head under that water as well.
I'd gladly quote at length from this book, but you're best served by just picking it up and reading a passage on your own. Actually, though, nobody picks up books now. Hm. Okay, here then: at random, here's a passage so you can get some tonguefeel of what Pollock does:
Arvin unwrapped the cloth carefully. The only gun his father had kept at home was a .22 rifle, and Willard never allowed him to touch it, let alone shoot it. Earskell, on the other hand, had handed the boy a 16-gauge Remington and took him to the woods just three or four weeks after he came to live with them. "In this house, you better know how to handle a gun unless you want to starve to death," the old man had told him.
That's not even all that great evidence of the strength of Pollock's writing, but it certainly gives a clear enough view of 1) the solidness of his sentences, as if each is carved, able to support whatever comes, and 2) the confidence, the propulsion of the story. This book's got not a bit of navel-gazing, no moments of characters suddenly having introverted flights of consideration, chapters carried along through one person's deliberation over minor trials. Which is the other thing to note: the violence of this book, about which I've said plenty, but you'll soon have your fill of anyway. Here's your phrase: prayer log. When you read the book and understand, you'll half wish you didn't.
Knockemstiff was auspicious as hell, a terrific debut, but I'm here to make clear two big things. First: The Devil All the Time is among the very best books of last year (it hit last July, I think, and I just missed it, had it shelved, skipped it for too long, who knows), which confirms that, no, Pollock was not just fucking around in Knockemstiff. Which is the second point: Devil is a great book, and Pollock is now, officially, no mistakes made, the Real Deal. Devil's got a layered, nuanced, complicated, massively satisfying plot, and features a dozen fully-fleshed characters, and Pollock's no longer a guy who hit the ground running with some of the tightest short fiction going anywhere. Now he's got a Hell Yes novel. Now we know how good he can get from book to book. Now we have some idea about how excited to get for whatever he does next.
