He alternates between praying and drinking, neither of which do much to alleviate his pain. Set again in rural, impoverished Knockemstiff and nearby Mead, the novel opens with the relationship of young Arvin Russell and his father, Willard, a haunted World War II vet who marries a beautiful woman and then watches her die from cancer. Instead, its various plot strands, which inevitably come together at the end, might have worked better as individual stories. It was inevitable that his next book would be an actual novel, and billed as such, but this isn’t the total knockout that one might have expected. A mill worker for three decades in blue-collar Ohio (where he sets his fiction), Pollock belatedly earned an MFA from Ohio State and published his collection of stories in which themes and characters were so interwoven that it might have passed as a novel. The unflinching, often hilarious stories in Knockemstiff (2008) drew considerable attention to a writer whose own story was as fascinating as his fiction. This debut novel occasionally flashes the promise that the author showed in his highly praised short-story collection, but falls short of fulfilling it.
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