Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock, and a Smear on Appalachian People

Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg entitled “A New American Voice” about Knockemstiff, a debut collection of stories by a new writer named Donald Ray Pollock. The article caught my eye not only because it was about a collection of short stories, which the WSJ seldom deigns to mention, but also because the author was 53, grew up in a small town in Appalachian southern Ohio, and went to school at Ohio University, my own graduate school alma mater. Early reviews compared Pollock to Eastern Kentucky writer Chris Offutt and Tennessee late bloomer William Gay, both favorite writers of mine and likened his book to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, one of the great American short story collections. However, being the parsimonious country boy that I am, I was not willing to shell out my twenty-something bucks for a hardback copy until I read at least one of the stories. I found the story “Real Life,” online.

The first couple of sentences go like this: “My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old. It was the only thing he was ever any good at.” O.K., I was up for that, but the first sentence of the second paragraph—“It was hotter than a fat lady’s box that evening”—let me know I was not in Winesburg. And it didn’t get any better. In this little family outing, the mother’s main talent is to shove a hotdog down her throat without messing up her lipstick. The father, concerned that drinking from a bottle would make a wino out of a man, drinks his whiskey from the car ashtray, butts and all. The real action begins when the father and son go to the concession-stand, and a man with arms the “size of fence posts” tells the father to watch his foul language around his son, a boy about the narrator’s size. When the father hits the big man, making the air “whoosh out of his body like a fart,” he encourages the narrator to beat up on the son as well. The story ends with the father bragging to the mother, “I bet a paycheck he broke that kid’s nose, the way the blood came out.” The narrator goes to bed licking the blood off his knuckles. “I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.”

Well, I didn’t; that was enough for me. I have always been a defender of everybody’s right to write about any horrible thing they want to, but there was such a grotesque absence of “redeeming social value” in the story that I really did not have the stomach for any more. I remember men and boys like the narrator and his father when I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, but mostly at a distance. I had no desire to encounter them back then, and I had no wish to read about them in Pollock’s over-the-top stories.

So why did I recently buy Knockemstiff and read all eighteen stories? Three reasons: One, it was in paperback for about ten bucks on Amazon. Two, it was on the list of short story collections published in the last two years that I had not read and promised in an earlier blog that I would eventually get to. Three, you shouldn’t judge a man’s work based on only one encounter with it.

Knockemstiff is a page-turner, all right, but primarily because it is all action and little thought and because Pollock’s style is direct and well edited—in short, an easy visceral read. The people who live in the little hardscrabble hamlet of Knockemstiff (which is about eight or ten miles south of Chillicothe) snort Bactine out of paper bags, have sex with their siblings, eat nothing but fried bologna, cheese slices, and Krispie Kreme donuts, drink a lot of beer and cheap booze, run meth labs, get hooked on OxyContin, beat up their kids, masturbate with toy dolls and a mud dauber’s nest, and rape ”retards” (to use the language of the addicts, drunks, and lay-abouts that populate Knockemstiff).

I read the whole damn thing and then flung it across the room. This was not Winesburg; it was Tobacco Road. The folks of Winesburg have some emotional complexity. They are “grotesque,” as Anderson called them, because of their unfulfilled desires and their loneliness, not because they snort Bactine and rape their sisters. I did some research on Pollock and found the following:

Although the publishers of the paperback quote the Wall Street Journal as saying that Pollock “could be the next important voice in American fiction,” what the WSJ article actually said was: “Now some in the book world say he could be the next important voice in American fiction.” Well, I couldn’t find anybody in the book world who said that. The New York Times review by Jonathan Miles was thoughtful but restrained, concluding, “Pollock’s voice is fresh and full-throated, and while these stories travel negligible distances, even from one another, the best of them leave an indelible smear.” To my way of thinking, when you finish the book you may feel the smear leaves a bad smell. And if you are a poor boy from the mountains, you may resent being tarred with Pollock’s stinky brush.

There were more publicity-driven pieces about the author than reviews of the book. The fact that Pollock is a high school dropout, a recovering alcoholic, and a laboring man who went to college late in life and didn’t start writing until about eight years ago made what Doubleday’s marketing director called “a great publicity hook to go out with.” The fact that such a man was able to write at all made the yuppies in the New York publishing world ooh and ah. The fact that he wrote about disgusting people in a funny-named village in the Appalachian mountains made them shake their heads in condescending disgust and nod their heads in agreement that this stuff could sell.

The buzz about the book is all about marketing, about selling the man, not the fiction, about perpetuating a stereotype of a region and its people. There is no human complexity in Pollock’s characters, just mostly meanness. Some of the people in these stories long for a better life and have media-created dreams of what that life might be, but most are just too ignorant to give a damn about anything but immediate simplistic, ugly pleasures. The problem is, too many readers, especially those who remember Deliverance, will assume that everyone in the Appalachian mountains are like the no-accounts in Knockemstiff. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. Mountain folk are the last cultural minority who must suffer simplistic stereotypes.

It was a serendipitous coincidence that while I was reading Pollock’s book, my wife brought me the March issue of Smithsonian, which featured an article about the Eastern Kentucky photographer Shelby Lee Adams, with a copy of his famous 1990 photograph Home Funeral. (See attached). The author of the article, Abigail Tucker, interviewed the grown-up woman, nicknamed Nay Bug, who is the little girl standing by the coffin in the picture.

Tucker notes that some critics say that Shelby Lee Adams is exploiting a region “already saddled with stereotypes involving poverty and violence.” Adams responds that he is capturing a fading culture and that as bleak as his photographs may be, “Within the shadows lie the depth and beauty of human beings…. Until we understand our own darkness, we won’t understand our beauty.” Perhaps that is true. I am certainly not trying to deny the effects of poverty on the people from the region I am proud to call home. I recognize those honest and hard-working I am happy to call “my people” in many of Adams’ photograph. You can see them yourselves on his website.

But I see no beauty in the darkness of Donald Ray Pollock’s stories. I would defend his right to write about the self-indulgent junkies of Knockemstiff. But I want nothing to do with them. It takes a very fine writer with a miraculous style to transform the sad and lonely people of rural Russia, Dublin Ireland, or Winesburg, Ohio into characters of depth and complexity. Donald Ray Pollock is no Turgenev, James Joyce, or Sherwood Anderson. He has created a lineup of ignorant irredeemables who are what my mother would call “trashy”-- “mean as snakes” and “orney as polecats.”

Playing it Safe with the Pulitzer: Olive Kitteridge and The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao

I finally found the time to read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a collection of thirteen loosely linked stories that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. Coincidentally, I just finished listening to (on my Ipod on daily dog walks) last year’s Pulitzer Prize Winner, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

As I have mentioned before, the Pulitzer Prize is seldom given to a collection of stories (Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, 1970; Stories of John Cheever, 1979; Robert Olen Butler’s Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1993, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, 2000). So I am happy that a group of stories won it this year, even though that pleasure is somewhat lessened by the fact that Random House has packaged the book as if it were a novel and that it seems to fulfill too slavishly Joseph Pulitzer’s original aim of the fiction prize—that it be given to a work published during the year “which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life…”

William H. Gass wrote a blistering attack on the Pulitzer in The New York Times Book Review (1985) that later appeared in his collection of essays, Finding a Form (1996). The most memorable quote from the essay: “The Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses.” Complaining that the judges are often chosen to represent their race, religion, or sex, Gass insists that the only qualification a judge of the Pulitzer should have is “unimpeachable good taste, which immediately renders irrelevant such puerile pluralistic concerns as skin color, sex, and origin. Egalitarians shouldn’t give prizes and be too humble to receive them.” Gass says the Pulitzer has perceived an important truth about our culture: “Serious literature is not important to it.”

As much as I admire the work of William H. Gass, that judgment may be a bit extreme. I enjoyed reading Olive Kitteridge and I enjoyed listening to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In the past few years, I have also got a lot of pleasure out of listening to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Known World by Edward P. Jones—all Pulitzer Prize winners that I admire and none of which I would call mediocre. (You will probably notice that I more often listen to novels than read them; novels just require less of my attention than short stories do.)

I admire William H. Gass’s work a great deal. His novella Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife is one of my favorite books, and I thought his novel The Tunnel was brilliant and beautifully written. I think it is laughable that such a masterpiece would be passed over by the Pulitzer, while such a mediocre work as Richard Ford’s Independence Day would win the prize. However, Gass’s blanket condemnation of the Pulitzer Prize may be a bit of sour grapes.

I thought that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a good novel. The voice of the narrator is hard to resist. But it was just a novel—and a very traditional, safe, coming-of-age novel at that. The fact that the young protagonist is a Dominican nerd who plays video games and writes science fiction/fantasy does not make it less traditional and less safe. And the style, because it is in the voice of Junior, who appeared in the stories in Drown, is more than a little sloppy.

I liked Olive Kitteridge also, but I did not “love it,” as some reviewers have rhapsodized. The recurrent appearance of the grouchy schoolteacher Olive sometimes seems like a gimmick to me. She is the central figure in some stories, but is only referred to in others. Strout’s idea is to present her in relationships with several different people—her husband, her son, her neighbors, her colleagues, etc—and thus reveal her to be more complex than any one person thinks she is. Sometimes this device works, sometimes it seems forced, especially when extreme events are invented to reveal Olive’s hidden nature. Sometimes you like her; sometimes you think she is a bitch. You never really know what makes her do the things she does. All you can say is, “That’s just Olive.” Although Olive Kitteridge has been compared to Winesburg, Ohio, in my opinion, it does not take the kind of chances, either in style or content, that Sherwood Anderson’s collection did in 1919.

William H.Gass’s opinion of the Pulitzer may be a bit extreme, but he is probably right that a novel or collection of stories that plays it safe is more apt to win the prize than one that takes chances with style, content, or theme.

John Burnside's "The Bell Ringer": PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories, 2009

If you want to read a paradigmatic example of the traditional lyrical/realistic short story, innovated by Chekhov (Collected Stories) and Turgenev (Sportsman’s Sketches) and then developed by Joyce (Dubliners) and Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), take a look at John Burnside’s “The Bell Ringer.”

Burnside’s discussion of the creative origins of his story suggests that he is well aware of this tradition. He says he started thinking about the story when he thought of how important bells, usually church bells, were to the community—to announce the outbreak of war, the return of peace, marriages, deaths, and important social occasions. Since the community was often defined by the reach of the bells, with those “beyond the peal” deemed to be outside that parish, he started thinking that maybe an experienced listener could not only determine by the tenor of the bells what they signified socially, but also “the secrets of individual bell ringers—their hidden wishes, their secret desires and fears, their private loneliness.” It’s a nice trope, fanciful, but somehow believable.

The key characteristics of the Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson lyrical/realistic tradition are all here: The “loneliness” that Frank O’Connor discusses in The Lonely Voice, the “secrets desires and fears” of an individual in a small community, a central metaphor that embodies the loneliness and secrets.

I don’t want to give a plot summary here, for another element of this short story tradition is, of course, the emphasis placed on the ending of the story, what Joyce described as an epiphany. Eva, the central character, has lost her father, lives in an old family house in a village in Scotland, is often alone because her husband works in other countries. She doesn’t really mind being alone, for there is little love or intimacy between her and her husband. Her one friend is her sister-in-law, who confides in her that she is having an affair. She joins a bell-ringing club so she can meet people. She does not make friends at the club, but she does become infatuated with a young American.

What I like about the story is the fictional world Burnside creates—a kind of reality/unreality that is both the world of everyday and the world of fantasy and fairytale. The story begins with Eva thinking the landscape around her looks like a children’s-book illustration, the snow steady and insistent in a kingdom that had succumbed to the bad fairy’s spell and slept for a hundred years in a viridian web of gossamer and thorns.” When she goes to the church for the bell-ringing in the tower, she thinks of the location as a “pagan place, a dark garden of yews and straggling roses and, at its center, the stone church, with its altar and its font and, above it all, the bells, suspended in the chill air of the belfry, heavy and still, waiting to be brought to life.” I like that rhythm.

The ending is announced this way: “It was like watching a conjurer perform a magic trick, when you shouldn’t really care, because you know it’s an illusion, but you just have to figure how it’s done.” The ending is absolutely inevitable and even predictable, but still a surprise. I like it when a story does that. I like it when everything comes together in a pleasurable little gasp.

If you like this story and you have not read all your Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson, then you have a lot of wonderful short story reading ahead of you. And while you are at it, read the two very finest contemporary short story writers in this tradition—Alice Munro and William Trevor.