The Heavenly Table, by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday). Set on the border between Alabama and Georgia, during the Great War, Pollock’s second novel is centered on the Jewetts, a family of poor sharecroppers. When the father dies of a heart attack, his three sons shoot their landlord and begin a picaresque life on the run. Pollock’s characters—often down-on-their-luck types—are rendered with a cartoonish intensity, from a well-endowed outhouse inspector to a boy discovered in a Cincinnati hotel “with a woman’s wig glued to his head and his pecker tossed under the bed like a cast-off shoe.” The novel is bawdy but grim; the “heavenly table” that the Jewetts believe is their inheritance stands in contrast to the miserable kingdom that Pollock describes, in loving detail, here on Earth.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment