the heavenly table by donald ray pollock

Times Literary Supplement 4 january 2017

Donald Ray Pollock’s second novel, The Heavenly Table, is a western that begins in 1917 on the border between Georgia and Alabama, and focuses on a society of extreme financial, emotional and often moral deprivation. A family of sharecroppers, the Jewetts, eat a breakfast of fried dough but “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 . . . with a hand that was never clean from a pot that was never washed”. Pearl Jewett, the illiterate widowed patriarch, is persuaded by a passing stranger that this life of hardship will be rewarded after death when he will sit at the heavenly table. He doggedly pursues misery, believing it will be proportionate to the recompense he will receive in the afterlife. When he dies, however, his three sons decide that a pulp novel called The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket (which only one of them can read) might offer a more worthwhile guide to life than their father’s example. They set off on a picaresque adventure, robbing their way towards Ohio.

Everyone in this novel is blighted; even a minor character’s “biggest disappointment of his life so far had been, in fact, his life so far”. As the United States enters the First World War, people start “kicking dachshunds to death, making 90-year-old Americans with German-sounding names get down on their knees in the streets and kiss the American flag, calling sauerkraut Liberty cabbage”.

Pollock frequently offers a kind of ironic commentary on the horrendous behaviour of his characters by giving pathetic reasons for it. A barman is driven to the repeated mindless torture of strangers after he is rejected by a woman whom he asks on a date. Another character is so infuriated by a prostitute crying over her sick baby that he beats her until she is unconscious and then rapes her. Amid all this misanthropy, one of the Jewett brothers dreams for “a sturdy house with polished floors and a good woman and clean clothes and books on a shelf”. He reads Richard III while on the run; it seems that no matter how depraved and hopeless we are, books might offer us deliverance.

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement