The Heavenly Table, by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday

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.

.