My review of Knockemstiff

“if I wanted to read books I liked I’d have been a math major, and I’d have read at home.”

Ian was a man made for books, and like everyone I’ve known, he had a piece of him I admired. His was a patience and a discipline to read through the worst of novels with an analytic mind, giving a more due credit to books than I ever could.

Life can be about overcoming obstacles, and how you go about doing it. Mine, in this case, is the bus. Required for transit, good for little else save for being a roving flu box that spreads a pandemic like gas on a fire. But it does force me to read. There’s no one to speak to, and it prevents me from being approached by vagrants and street-corner salesman.

I’m a man of non-fiction. I love reading political material or at the very least analytical pieces. But I force myself into fiction because it’s good to tackle something from all angles, even if one of those angles is only 10% of your total. Fast forward to me reading Knockemstiff. I wanted to finish it so badly so that my review would pack more of a punch, that maybe I could cite decent strokes of the pen, or great plot directions…

But Knockemstiff for all its many sub-stories, for its umbrellas reach over a small county in Southern Ohio can be summed up thusly: Faulkner’s first book from 8th grade, when he realized he could write profanity and still get an A.

Downtrodden people, dead end lives, and the assumed correlation between grotesque situations and good writing. That’s the only theme I can see marching down Pollock’s deranged Main Street. That somehow, if we have some physical representation of something horrible and revolting, then we’ve perfectly summed up a character and thusly have written well.

Before you assume I just can’t handle the heat, let me explain why I took such issue with it, and moreover why I don’t recommend you buy it.

For one thing the vulgar discourse is on just about every page. It’s so ever present that by the time you get past the last trucker/hitchhiker tranny rape scene, you’re knee deep in a man marching in his own diarrhea by some dick-headed cops in some rich snobby town. And that’s, I assume, a subtle outlier as well. This is social commentary at its most inexperienced and juvenile. You can almost hear the inner teenager complain about some social ill, but do nothing but drag it out to hyperbole to prove a point, and never look in the direction of a solution.

The other issue is I’m not sure if he wants to be Faulkner (he does) or Salinger. Scenes where a newly homeless man takes refuge in a rusted-out landmark of a car, and for an ending to this story, he finds in the car the small skull of a mouse that an owl, who is thought to inhabit the car, has likely killed. The scene closes with this man putting the skull in his mouth.

I’m sure if you liked Knockemstiff you’re offended that I’m painting all of this out of context. If so, you’re probably smarter than I am, please explain this to me. I think if anything, the book serves to keep people out of Southern Ohio which, having never been, doesn’t sound like a bad idea.