The Heavenly Table

Starred review from April 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.

May 1, 2016
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.

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May 1, 2016
Pollock (The Devil All the Time, 2011) sets this historical crime novel in 1917. It is largely the story of Georgia sharecropper Pearl Jewett and his sons, Cane, Cob, and Chimney. They're literally starving, living in a crumbling shack with a dirt floor, when Pearl dies. Only Cane, the oldest, can read, and the only book they own is a lurid pulp novel titled The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Buckets. So using Bloody Bill as a model, they set out to fill their bellies through robbery. But, in 24 hours, they are also murderers with a price on their heads. On their way to Canada, they fetch up in Meade, a small city in southern Ohio, where they encounter Ellsworth Fiddler and his wife, Eula. Ellsworth is a struggling small farmer who is unaware that the U.S. has entered a world war. And a strange tale gets even stranger. Think of The Heavenly Table as an antic, shambolic, guilty pleasure. Pollock's prose is compulsively readable and often very funny. Yes, the humor all seems to stem from sexual proclivities and excrement, but that's what makes the pleasure guilty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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.