The Devil All the Time
Donald Ray Pollock, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307744869
Summary
In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.
Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.”
There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.
Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1954
• Where—Knockemstiff, Ohio, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Ohio State University
• Awards—PEN-Robert Bingham Fellowship;
Guggenheinm Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Chillicothe, Ohio
Donald Ray Pollock is an American writer, who has lived his entire adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he worked at the Mead Paper Mill as a laborer and truck driver until age 50, when he enrolled in the creative writing program at The Ohio State University. While there, Doubleday published his debut short story collection, Knockemstiff, and the New York Times regularly posted his election dispatches from southern Ohio throughout the 2008 campaign.
Pollock is the recipient of the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Award. He also won the 2009 Devil's Kitchen Award in Prose sponsored by the English Department of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His work has appeared in various literary journals, including Epoch, Sou'wester, Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, The Journal, Boulevard, and PEN America.
His second book, The Devil All The Time, published in 2011, was listed by Publisher's Weekly as one of the top ten books of the year. He was recently awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Pollock knows how to dunk readers into a scene and when to pull them out gasping, and the muscular current of each plot line exerts a continuous pull toward the engulfing falls. Important as well, and welcome, is the native intelligence he grants each of his characters. While many of them may be backwoods, none are backwards; and almost all are rich with a fatalistic humor that is often their sole redeeming feature.
Josh Ritter - New York Times
You'll want to lock your doors. Donald Ray Pollock's first novel…is pretty much what the title predicts: a literary tsunami of pure evil…The book is grotesque, violent, haunting, perverse and harrowing—and very good. You may be repelled, you may be shocked, you will almost certainly be horrified, but you will read every last word.
Robert Goolrick - Washington Post
Pollock's first novel, The Devil All the Time, should cement his reputation as a significant voice in American fiction.... [He] deftly shifts from one perspective to another, without any clunky transitions—the prose just moves without signal or stumble, opening up the story in new ways again and again...where any prime-time television show can incite nail-biting with a lurking killer, Pollock has done much more. He's layered decades of history, shown the inner thoughts of a collage of characters, and we understand how deeply violence and misfortune have settled into the bones of this place. The question is much more than whether someone will die—it is, can the cycle of bloodletting break? This applies both to the people Pollock so skillfully enlivens as it does to the place he's taken as his literary heritage.
Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times
The Devil All the Time...fulfills the promise in [Pollock's] 2008 short-story collection, Knockemstiff, named after his real-life hometown, where life as is tough as its name suggests. His fictional characters find ways to make it tougher. Devil, as violent as the bloodiest parts of the Old Testament...invites comparisons to Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, who mined the grace and guilt in the hopeless lives of lost souls....But it's not so much what happens as how Pollock, with the brutal beauty of spare writing, brings it all together
Bob Minzesheimer - USA Today
As Arvin grows up—The Devil All the Time's narrative arcs from the end of World War II to the late 1960s—life's twists and turns provide him with a measure of salvation from his own past, and from the people whose soul-damaged lives Pollock has set down so indelibly on the blood-red altar of his incendiary imagination.
Lisa Shea - ELLE
(Starred review.) If Pollock’s powerful collection Knockemstiff was a punch to the jaw, his follow-up, a novel set in the violent soul-numbing towns of southern Ohio and West Virginia, feels closer to a mule’s kick, and how he draws these folks and their inevitably hopeless lives without pity is what the kick’s all about.... [H]appiness is elusive... Pollock pulls [his characters] all together, the pace relentless, and just when it seems like no one can ever catch a break, a good guy does, but not in any predictable way.
Publishers Weekly
Pollock first triumphed with his story collection, Knockemstiff, about the Midwestern town of that name where he grew up and its sad but tough residents. Here he moves on to full-length fiction with a terse examination of America's violent underbelly. Lots of in-house excitement; watch.
Library Journal
This debut novel occasionally flashes the promise that the author showed in his highly praised short-story collection, [Knockemstiff], but falls short of fulfilling it.... 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.... Though there's a hard-bitten realism to the character of Arvin, most of the [other characters] seem like gothic noir redneck caricature.... Pollock remains a singular stylist, but he has better books in him than this.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Devil All the Time:
1.Why does religion play so prominent a role in this book? Does the novel present a single religious vision...or a number of different visions? Talk about each character's preoccupation with God and Jesus, sacrifice and pain, hell and salvation.
2. What role does poverty play in the characters' lives? In what ways are they also shaped by sense of place, the land itself?
3. Talk about each of the characters. Do you feel sympathy or revulsion for any of them? Are you overwhelmed by their violent deeds...or are you able to eek out some sense of their humanity? What motivates them to commit the brutality they perpetrate on their victims?
4. Does redemption exist for these people? In what way does Arvin Eugene Russell point to its possibility?
5. The deputy sheriff says, at one point, "some people were born just so they could be buried." What do you make of that statement? Do you believe there is truth in it—a great deal...some...or none at all?
6. What does the book's title mean?
7. How did you experience this novel as you read it? What were your emotional reactions? Did you want to put it down and walk away...or were you compelled to keep turning pages?