The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock
My rating: 4/5 cats
Leaning over the horn of his saddle, Chimney spat and then said, “Well, I don’t know who those ol’ boys are back there, but I don’t figure they can shoot any better than we can.”
“Maybe, but there must be fifteen of them in that pack.”
“So?” Chimney said. “That many don’t even amount to one box of shells.”
so, donald ray pollock has written another book, and it’s got all the things we like: outlaws and whores and war and torture and angry trained chimpanzees and drugs and light-bondage homosexuals and disfiguring bar fights and drinking and shooting and screwing and robbing and a man with a penis so big that it coils and poop and killing and killing and killing and killing and killing.
and you can’t say the man doesn’t write some descriptive-ass prose, as when a father bemoans his disappointing son, pinpointing where it all went wrong:
Eula had insisted that Eddie finish the sixth grade before he was allowed to quit school, and the farmer was convinced that a big part of the boy’s problem had to do with his education. In other words, he had gotten just enough of it to fuck him up for the real world. Ellsworth had seen it happen before, mostly to flighty types like horny spinsters and weak-eyed store clerks with a lot of time to kill. They would stick their noses in a book and then all of a sudden Ross County, Ohio, wasn’t good enough for them. The next thing you knew, they either got caught up in some perversion, like the old Wilkins woman who somehow managed to split herself open on a bedpost, or they lit out for some big city like Dayton or Toledo, in search of their “destiny.” Sometimes the line that divided those two impulses blurred until they amounted to pretty much the same thing, as in the case of the Fletcher boy the police found butchered in a hotel room in Cincinnati with a woman’s wig glued to his head and his pecker tossed under the bed like a cast-off shoe.
books ruin everything! and this is only one of several instances in which books, reading, or education, lead these characters astray either in their too-lofty expectations for their own lives or in providing inappropriate role models to impressionable minds. damn you, books!
but this book is mostly great, although it is also not a smart place to look for role models. it’s just not as great as either Knockemstiff or The Devil All the Time and it’s largely down to the structure of the novel, which can be very frustrating. i am all about short stories as novels and i am all about multiple perspectives patchworked together to make up a narrative, so i was actually delighted when i found that this was the case here – a much more violent and saucier Our Town or Winesburg, Ohio, where characters either from or who will eventually converge in the small town of meade, ohio are allowed space to live out their story and win your sympathy or disgust until all paths cross and many of those paths’ll be covered in blood. cuz it’s a Donald Ray Pollock book, son.
and a lot of the situations here do have that wonderful winesburg flavor – people who are disappointed with their limited prospects, whose dreams are bigger than their surroundings, a chorus of voices raised in hopelessness, indignation, resignation:
–Lately, it seemed that wherever he turned, something beyond his comprehension was lying in wait to make him look like a fool.
–…why did he think things would be better somewhere else? They never had been. Not one time.
–He was right on the verge of finishing his first original composition, a slow, mournful piece in eight movements meant to capture the educator’s dread of returning to the classroom after the bliss of the summer break. Tentatively titled “Might as Well Hang Myself,” he had been working on it off and on for the past several years.
–Trained in classics, he had entered the military with abnormally high expectations, but unfortunately, the men he had encountered so far were a far cry from the muscle-bound sackers of Troy or the disciplined defenders of Sparta that he had been infatuated with since the age of twelve. Still, even though the draftees had been a sore disappointment, both physically and mentally, he had quickly learned to deal with them. It was simply a matter of lowering one’s standards to fit the circumstances. After all, how could one expect any of these poor, awkward, illiterate brutes to have even heard of Cicero or Tacitus when at least half of them had difficulty comprehending a simple order? In just a matter of days, he went from trying to form a Latin reading club to thinking that a lowly private who still had most of his teeth and could name the presidents was practically a paragon of good breeding and sophistication.
but it’s not without some humor
Although Blackie tried to promote his new place as the “Celestial Harem of Earthly Delights,” it was hard for anyone to accept Virgil Brandon’s goat shed as being anything close to an exotic playground; and, to his dismay, it quickly became known simply as the “Whore Barn.”
nor is it without that stoic acceptance of life’s injustices that is so frequently found in these grit lit tales:
after her husband is conned out of their entire life savings, a wife is observed,
But then one November morning, two months after the swindle, he overheard her say to herself, “Just have to start over, that’s all.” She was standing at the stove fixing breakfast, and she pursed her lips and nodded her head, as if she were agreeing with something someone else had said.
and there are so many wonderful small moments like these throughout the book; a rich scattered tapestry of tales.
however – the chapters are wicked short. how short, you ask? well, the book is 384 pages, and there are 72 chapters and an epilogue. most of the chapters are 4-5 pages, so you’re only just dipping in and out of these separate viewpoints without being given much chance to process what has happened before being shoved back into someone else’s path. and it’s not that the characters aren’t different enough and the reader gets confused, because pollock is great at variety and character and dialogue, but it’s still jarring to keep popping in and out and not being given enough time in between to get comfortable.
ask any of the girls at the whore barn, and they’ll tell you the same thing.
With a little trepidation, he pulled back the flap on the tent and stooped down a little as he entered. A woman with long blond tresses and a pretty face was squatted down over a bucket in the corner, but when she saw him, she sprung up and pulled her white slip down. She reached over and picked up a cigarette from a little wooden box on the table, then said with a frown, “Just give me a couple minutes, okay? I need a smoke…I’m supposed to get five minutes between customers.”
give us five minutes to clean our dirty bits before you come at us again, pollock!
i do think that it would have been a more enjoyable reading experience if he’d chosen a more leisurely pace instead of zip-zip-zipping between storylines, where the reader is hurtled through the story almost too quickly to appreciate all the really great and horrible things going on. in this case, the parts are stronger than the whole, but i’m going to give it four stars anyway because who’s going to stop me, you? psssshhh.
in closing, i will leave you with some words of wisdom, from the mouths of babes, pollock-style:
A couple of hours later, as they made their way through a thorny brake in single file, Cob turned in his saddle and looked back at Chimney. “Can I ask ye something?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“If’n one of them whores you talk about is worth two or three dollars, how much ye figure a good ham cost?”
“Oh, probably about the same, I reckon. They wouldn’t be much difference between a whore and a ham.”
“Well, then,” Cob said, “how many of them could we buy with the money we got?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a hundred.”
“Whew,”Cob exclaimed. “That sounds like a lot.”
“Yeah, it’d take a day or two to fuck that many.”
“No, I mean, that’s a lot of hams, ain’t it?”
Chimney laughed. “You’re goddamn right it is. Why, if ye was to eat that many hams, ye’d probably turn into a pig yourself.”
“Oh, that’d be fine with me,” Cob said. “All they do is lay around in the mud all day while somebody feeds ’em horseweeds and slop. Shoot, what more could a feller want out of life than that?”
indeed.
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i interview donald ray pollock HERE: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/s…
best day ever.
