“I was trying to figure out what the fuck you’d do when you write.” Eventually, thanks to a program funded by the local mill, he went to school part-time at Ohio State and went on to get an MFA. So he sat down in a chair at a typewriter-the secret to writing, he told me in an interview in 2008, is “I mean, you got to stay in the chair”-and typed out stories by Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and Richard Yates, word for word. Pollock knew he wanted to be a writer, but he didn’t know how to be a writer. With a population just under 60,000, Knockemstiff is the kind of town you don’t typically find in contemporary American literary fiction half-rotten by meth, starved for hope, and entirely broke, it’s about as far away from the world presented in Jonathan Franzen’s novels as you can imagine.
Pollock was born and raised there, and worked in a nearby paper mill for three decades. When Pollock hits the right notes, he hits them right out of the park.You can pinpoint the origins of Donald Ray Pollock’s literary genius directly to a town in Ohio called Knockemstiff. Donald Ray Pollock knows exactly what he wants to do with this story, and it shows as all the variables are carefully chosen, including the heartbreaking father-son relationship. How far can a distorted perception of one's life can affect another's. In that one, where a father shoots his son full of steroids, Pollock examines the destructive power of the ego. DISCIPLINE also was spectacular, for completely different reasons. It's one of the very good, haunting stories I've read this year. It's narrated from the son's perspective and it's harrowing.
It's the story of a coward and his son and Pollock exposes what cowardice is and how it affects and shapes people around you over time. I don't know if this is official publishing strategy, but it's not the first time I read a short story collection where the first story knocks it out of the park.
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