The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

Overview

From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying (and, disturbingly, weirdly funny) new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors.

It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family's entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it?

In the gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre's literary masters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385541305
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	887,979
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

DONALD RAY POLLOCK is the author of the novel The Devil All the Time and the story collection Knockemstiff, recipient of the 2009 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship. He worked as a laborer at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, from 1973 to 2005. He holds an MFA from Ohio State University.


From the Hardcover edition.

Read an Excerpt

In 1917, just as another hellish August was starting to come to an end along the border that divides Georgia and Alabama, Pearl Jewett awakened his sons before dawn one morning with a guttural bark that sounded more animal than man.   The three young men arose silently from their particular corners of the one-room shack and pulled on their filthy clothes, still damp with the sweat of yesterday’s labors.   A mangy rat covered with scabs scuttled up the rock chimney, knocking bits of mortar into the cold grate.  Moonlight funneled through gaps in the chinked log walls and lay in thin milky ribbons across the red dirt floor.   With their heads nearly touching the low ceiling, they gathered around the center of the room for breakfast, and Pearl handed them each a bland wad of flour and water fried last night in a dollop of leftover fat.  There would be no more to eat until evening, when they would all get a share of the sick hog they had butchered in the spring, along with a mash of boiled spuds and wild greens scooped onto dented tin plates with a hand that was never clean from a pot that was never washed.  Except for the occasional rain, every day was the same. 

“I seen me two of them niggers again last night,” Pearl said, staring out the rough-cut opening that served as the only window.   “Out there a-sittin’ in the tulip tree, singin’ their songs.  They was really goin’ at it.”   According to the owner of the land, Major Thaddeus Tardweller, the last tenants of the shack, an extended family of mulattoes from Louisiana, had all died of the fever several years ago, and were buried out back in the weeds along the perimeter of the now empty hog pen.  Due to fears of the sickness lingering on in a place where black and white had mixed, he hadn’t been able to convince anyone to live there until the old man and his boys came along last fall, half-starved and looking for work.  Lately, Pearl had been seeing their ghosts everywhere.  The morning before he’d counted five of them.  Gaunt and grizzled, with his mouth hanging open and the front of his trousers stained yellow from a leaky bladder, he looked as if any he might join them on the other side any minute.  He bit into his biscuit, then asked, “Did ye hear ’em?”

“No, Pap,” Cane, the oldest, said, “I don’t think so.”  At twenty-three, Cane was as close to being handsome as any sharecropper’s son could hope to get, having inherited the best of both parents:  his father’s tall, sinewy frame and his mother’s well-defined features and thick, dark hair; but the harsh, hopeless way they lived was already starting to crinkle his face with fine lines and pepper his beard with gray.  He was the only one in the family who could read, having been old enough before his mother passed for her to teach him from her Bible and an old McGuffey borrowed from a neighbor; and strangers usually viewed him as the only one of the bunch who had any promise, or for that matter, any sense.  He looked down at the greasy glob in his hand, saw a curly white hair pressed into the dough with a dirty thumbprint.  This morning’s ration was smaller than usual, but then he remembered telling Pearl yesterday that they had to cut back if they wanted the sack of flour to last until fall.  Pinching the hair loose from his breakfast, he watched it float to the floor before he took his first bite. 

“Only thing I heard was that ol’ rat runnin’ around,” Cob said.  He was the middle one, short and heavy-set, with a head round as a chickpea and watery green eyes that always appeared a little out of focus, as if he had just been clobbered with a two-by-four.  Though as stout as any two men put together, Cob had always been a bit on the slow side, and he got along mainly by following Cane’s lead and not complaining too much, no matter how deep the shit, how small the biscuit.  Even telling time was beyond his comprehension.  He was, to put it bluntly, what people usually referred to in those days as a dummy.  You might come across such a man almost anywhere, sitting on his haunches around some town pump, hoping for a friendly howdy or handout from some good citizen passing by, someone with enough compassion to realize that but for the grace of God, it could just as easily be himself sitting there in that sad, ragged loneliness.  Truth be told, if it hadn’t been for Cane looking out for him, that’s probably how Cob would have ended up, living out his days on a street corner, begging for scraps and the occasional coin with a rusty bean can. 

The old man waited a moment for the youngest to respond, then said, “What about you, Chimney?  Did ye hear ’em?”

Chimney stood with a dazed look on his pimply, dirt-streaked face.  He was still thinking about the splay-toothed floozy with the fat tits that the old man’s raspy squawk had chased away a few minutes ago.  Last night, as with most evenings whenever Pearl passed out on his blanket before it got too dark to see, Cane had read aloud to his brothers from The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, a crumbling, water-stained dime novel that glorified the criminal exploits of an ex-Confederate soldier turned bank robber cutting a swath of terror throughout the old West.  Consequently, Chimney had spent the last few hours dreaming of gun fights on scorched desert plains and poontang that tasted like honey.  He glanced over at his brothers, yawning and scratching like a couple of dogs, eating what might as well have been lumps of clay and listening to that nutty bastard prattle on about his black buddies in the spirit world.  Of course, he could understand Cob buying Pearl’s bullshit; there weren’t enough brains in his head to fill a teaspoon.  But why did Cane continue to play along?  It didn’t make any sense.  Hell, he was smarter than any of them.   Being loyal to any old mother or father was fine up to a point, Chimney reckoned, no matter how crazy or senile they had become, but what about their own selves?  When did they get to start living?

“I’m talkin’ to you, boy,” Pearl said. 

Chimney looked down at the shelf of greenish gray mold growing along the bottom of the cabin walls.  A simple yes or no wasn’t going to cut it, not this morning.   Perhaps because he was the runt of the family, rebelliousness had always been the bigger part of his nature, and whenever he was in one of his defiant or pissed-off moods, the seventeen-year-old was liable to say or do anything, regardless of the consequences.   He thought again about the juicy wench in his dream, her dimpled ass and sultry voice already fading away, soon to be extinguished completely by the backbreaking misery of swinging an axe in another hundred degree day.  “Don’t sound like no bad deal to me,” he finally said to Pearl.  “Layin’ around pickin’ your teeth and playin’ music.  Shit, why is it they get to have all the fun?”

“What’s that?”

“I said the way things is goin’ around this goddamn place, I’d trade even up with a dead darkie any day.” 

The room went quiet as the old man pulled his slumped shoulders back and tightened his mouth into a grim leer.  Clenching his fists, Pearl’s first thought was to knock the boy to the floor, but by the time he turned away from the window, he’d already changed his mind.  It was too early in the morning to be drawing blood, even if it was justified.  Instead, he stepped closer to Chimney and studied his thin, triangular face and cold, insolent eyes.  Sometimes the old man almost found it hard to believe the boy was one of his own.  Of course, Cob had always been a disappointment, but at least he had a good heart and did what he was told, whereas Cane, well, only a fool would find fault with him.  Chimney, on the other hand, was impossible to figure out.  He might work like a dog one day and then refuse to hit a lick the next, no matter how much Pearl threatened him.  Or he might give Cob his share of the evening meal, then turn around and shit in his shoes while he was eating it.  It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind between being good or evil, and so he tried his best to be both.  Not only that, he was woman-crazy, too, had been ever since he first found out his pecker would get hard.  And he didn’t give a damn who knew it either; you could hear him jerking it over there in his blanket two or three times every night, especially if Cane had read to him again from that goddamn book they treasured like a holy relic.  Pearl thought about something he had once heard an auctioneer say at a livestock sale, about how when the stud gets older, the litters get weaker, not only in the body, but in the head, too.  “Don’t just go for your animals either,” the man said.  “Had an old boy back home caught him a young wife and decided at fifty-nine he wanted to bring one more of his own into the world before he dried up for good.  Poor thing was born one of them maniacs like they got locked up in the nuthouse over in Memphis.” 

“What happened to it?’ Pearl had asked.

“Sold it to some banana man down in South America who collects such things,” the auctioneer replied.  Back then, Pearl had dismissed the notion as part of some sales pitch to run the bidding up on a pair of young bulls, but now he realized there might be some truth in it.  Though he hated to admit it, from the looks of things, his seed had already lost some of its vigor when he and Lucille made Cob, and by the time he shot Chimney into the oven, it had gone from slightly tepid to downright sour. 

Even so, perhaps because he was the youngest or had yet to grow the scraggly beard his brothers wore, Chimney was still the one that reminded Pearl of his dead wife the most.  He leaned closer and stared into the boy’s eyes even more intently, as if he were peering into a smoky portal to the past.  Chimney looked over at his brothers again, took the last bite of his biscuit.  The old man’s breath reeked of stomach gas and rancid drippings.  A solitary bird began to twitter from somewhere close by, and suddenly Pearl was recalling a long ago night when he had walked Lucille home from a barn dance just a few weeks before they married.  The autumn sky was glittering with stars, and a faint smell of honeysuckle still hung in the cool air.  He could hear the gravel crunching beneath their feet.  Her face appeared before him, as young and pretty as the first time he ever saw her, but just as he was getting ready to reach out and touch her cheek, Chimney shattered the spell.  “Hell, yes,” he said, “maybe we should ask them niggers if they’d be a-willin’ to—”

Without any warning, Pearl’s hand whipped out and caught the boy by the throat.  “Spit it out,” he growled.  “Spit it out.”  Chimney tried to break away, but the old man’s grip, seasoned by years of plowing and chopping and picking, was tight as a vise.  With his windpipe squeezed shut, he soon ceased struggling and managed to spew a few wet crumbs from his mouth that stuck to the hairs on Pearl’s wrist. 

“Pap, he didn’t mean nothing,” Cane said, moving toward the two.  “Let him go.”  Though he figured his brother probably deserved getting the shit choked out of him, if for no other reason than being a constant aggravation, Cane also knew that getting their father too upset this early in the morning meant that he would push them twice as hard in the field today, and it was tough enough working a slow pace when you had but one biscuit to run on. 

“I’m sick of his mouth,” Pearl said through clenched teeth.  Then he snorted some air and tightened his hold even more, seemingly resolved on shutting the boy up forever. 

“I said let him go, goddamn it,” Cane repeated, just before he grabbed the old man’s other arm and wrenched it behind his back with a violent twist that filled the room with a loud pop.  Pearl let out a piercing howl as he shoved Chimney away and jerked free of Cane.  The boy coughed and spat out the rest of his biscuit onto the floor, and they all watched in the gloomy half-light as the old man ground it into the dirt with his shoe while working the hurt out of his shoulder.  Nothing else was said.  Even Chimney was temporarily out of words. 

When he was done, they all followed Pearl out of the shack single file.  Cob stopped at the well and drew a pail of water, and they carried it, together with their tools—three double-headed axes and a couple of machetes and a rusty saber with a broken tip—along the edge of a long green cotton field.  As the sun crested the hills to the east, looking like the bloodshot eye of a hung-over barfly, they came to a swampy piece of acreage they were clearing for Major Tardweller.  He had promised them a bonus of ten laying hens if they finished the job in six weeks, and Cane figured they might just make it at the rate they were going.  He peeled off his ragged shirt and draped it over the top of the canvas bucket to keep the gnats and mosquitoes out, and another day of work began.  By afternoon, with nothing but warm water sloshing around in their guts, all they could think about was that sick hog hanging in the smokehouse.

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Donald Ray Pollock

Where does Donald Ray Pollock belong? The title of his first book suggested one answer: His 2008 story collection, Knockemstiff, was named after the pugnacious southern Ohio town where he grew up. But while Knockemstiff put him on the map, his sensibility is still off the grid. Contemporary literary culture thrives on bright young things and long-toiling midlisters, but Pollock is a longtime paper mill employee who entered an MFA program and began writing in earnest in his fifties. And the parcel of Ohio he writes about is similarly hard to place, more a confluence of other regions than one with a clear definition itself.

"Probably half the people who lived [in Knockemstiff] had originally lived in Kentucky or West Virginia," he says. "Growing up I probably was thinking of where I lived as more being in the South than anywhere else. My thing in my last two novels has been people from different places having this moment or meeting up at some point. Because I'm in southern Ohio, they're going to meet up in southern Ohio eventually."

Which is to say he writes about quintessentially American culture clashes, in a style that suggests multiple locales as well. In his two novels, 2011's The Devil All the Time and the new The Heavenly Table, he collides southern-style preachers, midwestern farmers, and city slickers in prose that accommodates noir, Twain-like humor, and Border Trilogy–era Cormac McCarthy. The common thread is old-fashioned sin and violence. In The Heavenly Table, an army camp is barely holding together, undone by local prostitutes and a gay officer fearfully hiding his orientation; meanwhile, an outlaw band of brothers in Georgia named Cane, Chimney, and Cob have escaped their hyperreligious and abusive father and are determined to spread mayhem on their way north. Pollock's moral universe is unflinchingly payback-oriented: Tardweller, a farm owner who deceives the brothers, gets his comeuppance via a machete in the neck: "He remained upright, his eyes blinking rapidly and his mouth opening and closing like a landed fish sucking air."

Whether they're played for laughs or tragedy, Pollock's bloody milieus suggest we're never too far from our most violent capabilities. In this edited version of our conversation, Pollock speaks about the use of violence in his fiction, religion, television, and his unusual path into publishing. —Mark Athitakis

The Barnes & Noble Review: Your first book, Knockemstiff, was set in contemporary southern Ohio. The Devil All the Time was set after World War II. This one is set in 1917. What's prompting you to go deeper and deeper into the past?

Donald Ray Pollock: My initial idea [for The Heavenly Table] was to write a story about an army camp that actually existed here in the town where I live, Chillicothe. Camp Sherman. I was talking to a local historian one day, and he was telling me about the camp, and I thought, I can maybe write a book about this.

I really can't explain why I keep going back into the past, other than I guess I just feel better about the past than I do the present. I'm not tech savvy at all, and I really don't even want to get into all that; I think that to write a contemporary book you have to, at least to an extent. I'm just more comfortable in the past.

BNR: Do you feel that it's easier to write about characters with violent temperaments if you're writing about them in the context of the past?

DRP: I don't think that's it, because I think America is more violent right now than it ever has been, at least around here where I live.

BNR: In your two novels, you're very interested in children who have experienced an extreme religious upbringing that leads to curdled and violent behavior. How much does that match your own perspective on religion?

DRP: I'm Episcopalian, and I'm very liberal as far as religious views. One of the reasons I was attracted to Episcopalianism is because you don't really even have to believe in God. Where I grew up, there was a little church and it was very fire-and-brimstone. I know a lot of people who believe in the Bible literally, that whatever is in the Bible is true. Between the politics and the religion, it kind of gets mixed up into this brew of people who are Christians but who have some strange ideas about an eye for an eye. I have always been fascinated with people who can believe that strongly in something. When I write about it, that's where it's coming from. I'm just fascinated that somebody could really believe that the earth is only 4,000 years old or whatever.

BNR: So it's more the rigidity you're critiquing than religion, per se.

DRP: I'm not critiquing religion. I think religion's a good thing. If nothing else, it gives us some rules to live by. I'm even a little bit envious of someone who can believe it. At least they have that belief. They are going through life thinking they're going to heaven, this isn't all, this isn't the end or anything like that.

BNR: The three brothers in the Jewett gang are obsessed with a pulp novel called The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, which I'm assuming is modeled after [Confederate outlaw] Bloody Bill Anderson, using it as a model for their criminal behavior. That becomes their Bible, in a way.

DRP: Actually, I didn't get the idea for that dime novel from Bloody Bill Anderson. Until you brought his name up I'd forgotten all about him. I wanted them to have a book, and I goofed around with a few titles and came up with that. In my unconscious mind I might have been thinking about Bloody Bill Anderson, but I wasn't really thinking about him at the time. For Cane I suppose it's sort of an inspiration; he uses that as a kind of textbook on how to get out of where they are. Chimney is interested in the sex and the violence, of course. Cob is just a little leery of it, I think, after his brothers get to talking about it more seriously.

BNR: When people talk about your influences, they often mention John Cheever or Flannery O'Connor or Denis Johnson or Cormac McCarthy. This book strikes me as more intentionally Twain-like.

DRP: I don't think Twain was really on my mind so much, but I was trying to make the book funny, at least in places. I was trying to model it on a better version of a dime novel. Some of the characters who pop up, when those got on the page it was like, This is an opportunity. I can use this to do some funny stuff.

BNR: Do you feel that for each book you need to make the violence more grotesque, visceral, intense? I think about the scene where Tardweller is killed in this book, or in your previous book, the scene of a tent preacher pouring spiders on his head.

DRP: I'm not consciously trying to say, OK, this one's got to be even weirder than the last one. I want things to happen, and with these people, this is the sort of thing that occurs in their lives. With the death of Tardweller, compared to some of the stuff that goes on nowadays, that wasn't that violent, I guess, to me. I hate to say it, but for the last four or five years I've been influenced a lot by TV, stuff like Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad. They go so far with some of the violence in these shows I'm thinking, Well, OK, I can do this and people aren't going to be freaking out.

BNR: How is television helpful for a novelist?

DRP: I think the big thing is the plot. You have this character who appears maybe in the third episode and then he's back in it in the tenth episode. There's just so many plot threads going through these shows, and I think that's what they do best, besides coming up with the characters. I think that if you're going to write a novel you have to have some sort of plot. I've read a few that don't really seem to have one that are really good, but I don't think that one of mine would come off if I didn't have some sort of plot, or at least pushing the action forward as much as I can.

BNR: What elevates a novel beyond the plot for you? I suppose that's a way of asking what the negative effects of television are.

DRP: The language. As far as getting to a point where it's better than a dime novel, the language and the way that you treat the characters, where you care about the characters or you just don't give a damn about them. I can't really say that I've read that many dime novels, but I would say that that would be a part of it, and maybe just a more involved plot instead of "Bloody Bill robs banks and eventually gets killed," that sort of thing.

BNR: You do a good job of ventriloquizing this bad, overly florid, pulp-novel writing at a couple of points in The Heavenly Table. I would imagine that maybe you'd spent a little bit of time looking into them.

DRP: When I was a kid we didn't have any books in the house. My parents, though, did read a lot of romance magazines and true-crime magazines, that sort of thing. When I started reading that's what I was reading. We're talking from, say, 1960, and that stuff was pretty . . . I doubt very much it was written very well.

BNR: There's something about the language of The Heavenly Table that seems to match the time in which it was set. I think that's true about The Devil All the Time, too, which has this '50s and '60s, Jim Thompson–esque, noir-ish vibe, while this is a little bit more countrified. How much do you think about the relationship between language and dialogue and the time in which your writing is set?

DRP: With The Devil All the Time I was definitely trying to write short sentences for the most part and not waste a word if at all possible. With this one, when I began there were some long sentences in there, and I just went with that. Of course, as I revised I changed some of it, and I cut some sentences and added on to others. Once I got the rhythm, it played in my head while I was working. I was trying to put the reader into 1917 as much as I could.

BNR: Did you spend much time researching life in southern Ohio in 1917?

DRP: There are about four or five local historians around here who have written small books about Camp Sherman, so I read those. I looked up a few things on the Internet as far as what would things cost at that time. Other than that, no. That was about it as far as the research goes. I just recently saw a quote from somebody who said, "If you've got to do a bunch of research for a book, you're not ready to write." There's not a lot of stuff there that somebody probably couldn't just invent. I just didn't feel comfortable with doing the whole historical accuracy thing.

BNR: What helped you break away from being focused explicitly on the military camp?

DRP: The brothers. When I started writing this thing I was flailing around like crazy trying to figure out where my story was. One day these three brothers just appeared on the page. It's one of those things. I think when you're writing fiction there's some things that you just can't explain. They appeared. For several days I wasn't really paying that much attention to them, I didn't know if they were going to be in the book or not. One morning a few days after that I just started writing that first chapter, and by the time I finished it I thought, I think this is my story. I still had the camp in there at that point, but then the farmer came along, and his son runs off and he thinks he's going to join the army. I've got to say, the book was a real mess for quite a while.

BNR: How long in total did it take to write the novel? DRP: It took a long time. I got lucky: The Devil All the Time did really well in France and Germany, so I kept getting invited back to France. I did a lot of traveling for a couple years while I was trying to work on the book. But the problem with me is that I'm not a good traveler. I can only work at home, and every time I did a trip — I went to France maybe nine times — I lost a month to get back into the rhythm and just to get back to working again. I would say that [The Heavenly Table] took around three years, but with a lot of interruptions. I had told my wife at the beginning of last year, "I'm not going anywhere this year, I'm finishing this book," and I managed to do that.

BNR: Is there a distinction between how European and American audiences respond to your work?

DRP: With the French and the Germans, they're looking at my work as a picture of what it's like to live in the Midwest. I think with the American readers, it's more like, "Hey, it's just a good story." The French are really into this sort of genre or whatever that I write in, people like Daniel Woodrell. I think that they see writers either write about the East Coast or the West Coast, and then there's these people that are writing about the Midwest, and their books are probably about what it's really like over there. The French are, I've got to say, terrific readers. They're probably a lot more into books than we are.

BNR: When Knockemstiff came out you were presented as an example of a working-class writer who was writing quality fiction. Around the same time, a debate started surging arguing that MFA programs are enclaves for the privileged, and that there was a whole American class that was being neglected in books that the big houses were putting out and written by MFA grads. Do you buy into that argument? Do you think that territory has changed at all since you've started publishing?

DRP: I went to an MFA program when I was fifty. I quit my job and I had a chance to go to this program at Ohio State, and they were going to give me a stipend for three years as long as I taught a class every quarter. I looked upon it as, OK, this is my way out of the paper mill. Because I wasn't going have to worry about getting a job right off the bat, and I was also going to be around people who loved writing. And I'd never had that before. It was a fantastic deal for me. The people that I was with in that program, they weren't privileged or wealthy.

With that being said, though, I don't think you need to go to an MFA program to learn how to write, or to be a writer. Basically, it's reading and writing, and you can do that working at Walmart. If you've got the drive, you can do that selling shoes or whatever. Some people go to an MFA program believing, "This is what I want to do. I want to be a writer," and by the end of that program they realize, "No, I don't think I want to be a writer." There's a lot of work and there's a lot of disappointment.

BNR: Not a lot of pay, often.

DRP: Yeah, not a lot of pay. It's an expensive way, I guess, to find out that that's not what you want to do. But at the same time, it gives other people a leg up, at least a little bit of time to learn what this thing's all about.

BNR: Do you still teach?

DRP: No, I don't. I'm a lousy teacher. I found that out when I was in that MFA program. I was a fifty-year-old factory worker, and I was teaching freshman comp to eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. I couldn't get it. It was a big disappointment at the time, because my plan was to try to maybe publish a collection of stories and then land a job at a small college somewhere. I thought that would be a really nice way to live. But then I got up there and figured out, "You're so terrible at this." It was like, I can either go work at Walmart or I can try to write.

— July 10, 2016

Editorial Reviews

Winter 2018

After their father unexpectedly dies on their Southern farm, the three Cane brothers, inspired by reading a particularly violent dime novel, turn to a life of crime that takes them north to Ohio. Pollock's dark humor makes this gothic story a pleasure to read even at its most depraved.

Library Journal

…wild, rollicking and wonderfully vulgar…On the surface, it's a classic cowboy plot: three (mostly) good-hearted outlaws riding off in search of a better life, with the law and an assortment of ragtag posses on their tails. Pollock has set himself the task of working within the constraints of genre, but because he's such a smart and funny writer, he's incapable of delivering an empty entertainment. And in fact, one slowly discovers the novel to be both a subtle critique of snobbery in general and a particular snobbery that claims to distinguish "serious" fiction from unserious. Yes, The Heavenly Table is an old-fashioned yarn with a pretty predictable plot—but that's the point, and as with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (an obvious influence), it is also a riotous satire that takes on our hopeless faith in modernity, along with our endless capacity for cruelty and absurd pretension.

The New York Times Book Review - Alexander Maksik

★ 04/18/2016
With furious prose and a Faulknerian eye for character, Pollock (The Devil All the Time) populates his second novel with dozens of memorable people who embody America’s headlong leap toward the future in the early 20th century. In 1917, everything changes for the Jewett brothers—Cane, the capable one; Cob, the “slow” one; and Chimney, the hothead—upon their father’s sudden ascension to the “heavenly table.” With the exploits of their pulp fiction hero Bloody Bill Bucket fresh in their minds, the brothers embark on a violent journey north, escaping the backbreaking, fetid swamps on the Georgia-Alabama border and their lives under the thumb of sadistic landowner Maj. Thaddeus Tardweller. In southern Ohio, aging farmer Ellsworth Fiddler and his wife wait for their prodigal son to return home after a brief absence, during which he may or may not have enlisted in the United States Army to fight in Europe. Facing inexorable change—automobiles, airplanes, the machinery of war and agriculture—Ellsworth and others who frequent the local mercantile are “in agreement that the world now seemed head over heels in love with what tycoons and politicians kept referring to as ‘progress.’ ” But the Fiddlers cannot fathom how their lives will be transformed when the Jewetts ride into town on a crime spree that has made them the most wanted men in the country. Set against the backdrop of America’s involvement in WWI and the rise of motorized and electrical technology, Pollock’s gothic, relentless imagination seduces readers into a fertile time in America’s history, exploring the chaos, wonder, violence, sexuality, and ambition of a nation on the cusp of modernity—and the outmoded notion of redemption in a world gone to hell. Agent: Richard Pine and Nathaniel Jacks, Inkwell Management. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Heavenly Table:

“Yes, The Heavenly Table is an old-fashioned yarn with a pretty predictable plot ─ but that’s the point, and as with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (an obvious influence), it is also a riotous satire that takes on our hopeless faith in modernity, along with our endless capacity for cruelty and absurd pretension…As much as we’d like to take comfort in the thought that all of this happened far away and a century ago, the fact is that Pollock’s funny, damning novel belongs, more than ever, to the country we live in now.”
— Alexander Maksik, New York Times Book Review

"Like a hybrid masterwork of Quentin Tarantino and Flannery O'Connor, Donald Ray Pollock's second novel, The Heavenly Table, is a comic Southern Gothic romp, hell-bent on making the reader squirm and laugh, often at the same time...The literary feast the novel offers becomes its own heavenly table..."
— William J. Cobb, Dallas Morning News

"There’s just no way to emerge unsullied and unscathed from Donald Ray Pollock’s Southern Gothic outlaw tale The Heavenly Table. Readers venturing into this grim territory, out beyond Cormac McCarthy and Patrick DeWitt, in the bizarre vicinity of Harry Crews’ manic intensity and the depraved noir of Jim Thompson, are apt to be startled and disturbed by what they witness, and not least of all by the sound of their own laughter...While some readers will feel that Pollock goes too far, others will find him very much in step with the times."
— David Wright, Seattle Times

“Pollock, the author of a previous novel, The Devil All The Time, and a collection of stories, has a rare gift of creating compelling characters that interact in a believable manner even in unbelievable circumstances. Heavenly, despite its dour premise, is a delight to read, absorbing and thought-provoking. As a historical novel, it reveals a world that is poised between the past and the present in meaningful ways.”
— Jim Ewing, Jackson Clarion-Ledger
 
“The Heavenly Table disgorges a smorgasbord of horrors yet this reviewer could not stop laughing. Agony can be hilarious. This book is Donald Ray Pollock’s masterpiece.”
— Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily News

"In its bloody, violent, terrible collisions, The Heavenly Table feels like Blood Meridian if Cormac McCarthy had been born with a streak of black humor in him rather than just terseness and rage. Or like an early, freaky Tom Robbins novel if Robbins had been a mean-hearted sadist to whom death (ugly, swift and meaningless) had been the only natural conclusion to every paragraph. It is a book that leaves a sheen of filth on you when you read it. Which makes you taste the road dust and pig's feet (and worse), and see some things that you can never un-see.
But by the end of it — by the time the curling paths of the Fiddlers and the Jewetts and a dozen-odd other random characters have twined together — it has also turned a smart and complicated corner, asking (without ever really asking) who are the bad men and who are the good?"
— Jason Sheehan, Npr.org

One of Amazon.com's 10 Best Books of July

"Like Mr. Pollock’s 2011 “The Devil All the Time,” this is a jauntily amoral, amusingly macabre and somewhat juvenile entertainment—a beach read to enjoy on the shore of a lake of fire." 
— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"To read this book, you’ll need a strong stomach and may want a hot shower afterward, but you’ll never forget Pollard’s compelling characters." — Vicki Weisfeld, Christian Science Monitor

"The Heavenly Table succeeds in unifying a series of long and short narrative strands into a cohesive whole. Without sacrificing irony, [Pollock's] writing possesses a sincerity that has no time for late-postmodern gaming, and while remaining committed to realist conventions, his blue-collar sensibility distinguishes him from contemporary practitioners like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides."
— Aaron Botwick,Open Letters Monthly

PW Picks: Book of the Week
"With furious prose and a Faulknerian eye for character, Pollock (The Devil All the Time) populates his second novel with dozens of memorable people who embody America’s headlong leap toward the future in the early 20th century...Pollock knocks it out of the park."

One of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Best Books of July

"In a dark yet redeeming Gothic story set in the farmlands of Georgia and Ohio in the early 1900s, the three Jewett brothers set out on a cross-country journey of crime and violence. Little do they know that fate has arranged for their paths to cross with a farmer and his wife who will change their trajectory."
—The Sacramento Bee


"With furious prose and a Faulknerian eye for character, Pollock (The Devil All the Time) populates his second novel with dozens of memorable people who embody America’s headlong leap toward the future in the early 20th century.
 
In 1917, everything changes for the Jewett brothers—Cane, the capable one; Cob, the “slow” one; and Chimney, the hothead—upon their father’s sudden ascension to the “heavenly table.” With the exploits of their pulp fiction hero Bloody Bill Bucket fresh in their minds, the brothers embark on a violent journey north, escaping the backbreaking, fetid swamps on the Georgia-Alabama border and their lives under the thumb of sadistic landowner Maj. Thaddeus Tardweller. In southern Ohio, aging farmer Ellsworth Fiddler and his wife wait for their prodigal son to return home after a brief absence, during which he may or may not have enlisted in the United States Army to fight in Europe. Facing inexorable change—automobiles, airplanes, the machinery of war and agriculture—Ellsworth and others who frequent the local mercantile are “in agreement that the world now seemed head over heels in love with what tycoons and politicians kept referring to as ‘progress.’ ” But the Fiddlers cannot fathom how their lives will be transformed when the Jewetts ride into town on a crime spree that has made them the most wanted men in the country.
 
Set against the backdrop of America’s involvement in WWI and the rise of motorized and electrical technology, Pollock’s gothic, relentless imagination seduces readers into a fertile time in America’s history, exploring the chaos, wonder, violence, sexuality, and ambition of a nation on the cusp of modernity—and the outmoded notion of redemption in a world gone to hell."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Donald Ray Pollock is a master-worker.  This great novel flows like buttermilk, so smooth and entertaining that you won't be ready for the left hook it delivers to your heart or its sophisticated moral analysis of human life.  Pollock has an omniscient eye like Gogol, taking in a vast scene while spinning tales within tales.  Readers will love him, writers will study him.” 
 —Atticus Lish, author of Preparation for the Next Life

"The Heavenly Table is brilliant and unforgettable.  In his trademark blend of humor and pathos, Donald Ray Pollock gives us a view into life's darkest corners, without ever forgetting there is a lighter side as well."
 —Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and The Son

"Think of The Heavenly Table as an antic, shambolic, guilty pleasure. Pollock’s prose is compulsively readable and often very funny."
—Booklist

"A darkly comic gorefest by a gifted writer." 
—Kirkus

“In a crowded room full of voices, Don Pollock’s voice is so distinct you’ll hear first and won’t ever, ever forget it. Nor will you want to. And the kicker is this: He somehow keeps getting better.”
—Tom Franklin, author of Poachers and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
 
“The Heavenly Table is the latest and strongest evidence that Donald Ray Pollock is one of the most talented and original writers at work today. With uniquely vivid and graceful prose he renders a tale destined to linger in the reader’s mind, a story by turns violent and darkly amusing, and always powerful. The novel is sure to be ranked among the year’s best.”
—Michael Koryta, New York Times-bestselling author of Those Who Wish Me Dead

“The Heavenly Table is a ferociously gothic ballad about desperate folks with improbable dreams and scant means. It is potent and chimeric, dank, violent, swamped in tragedy—and funny as hell.”
—Daniel Woodrell, author of The Maid's Version and Winter's Bone

From the Publisher

2016-04-13
In 1917, after the death of their father, three dirt-poor Georgia brothers murder their employer, steal guns and horses, and embark on an epic crime spree. Cane, Cob, and Chimney Jewett cut a wide and bloody swath as they head north toward Canada—they even shoot down an airplane in one memorable scene. By the time they reach southeastern Ohio, there's a big bounty on their heads and a passel of slapdash posses on their trail, and the rap sheet of their legend includes not only the things they have done, but several they haven't (necrophilia, for instance). Finally they pause in southern Ohio, where they spend a few days recovering (one brother has been wounded) on the homestead of Ellsworth and Eula Fiddler, plain country folk who take them in for what turns out to be a rural idyll. Then, motivated by the desire to spend some of their ill-gotten gains on the high life, prostitutes, even a fast car, they move on to nearby Meade, a military-camp crossroads that's rough and chaotic and about to get even more so. This is in most ways pretty standard rural gothic, full of bright-hued mayhem and scatological wit, but Pollock (The Devil All the Time, 2011, etc.) brings way more flair and invention to the enterprise than most writers could. A darkly comic gorefest by a gifted writer.

Kirkus Reviews