The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock

Doubleday, 384 pages, $27.95

There’s a lot to be said for having lived another life before taking up a pen and writing critically praised books. Donald Ray Pollock grew up in Knockemstiff, Ohio. (Not so strange, then, is the title of his first book, a short story collection named “Knockemstiff.”) He worked as a laborer and truck driver until he was 45. He then received an MFA from Ohio State and began to write. Like Athena, born fully formed, Pollock’s books arrived fully formed. No fumbling around for him. For “The Heavenly Table,” a very different crime novel set in an impoverished part of the South in 1917, Pollock wrote what he knows: people and their miseries, and put it in an interesting time period, at the start of World War I.

“The Heavenly Table” contains the stories of many people from all walks of life. Some of those stories are longer than others, but even the vignettes are mighty worthy. The characters who stay the longest and whose peregrinations provide the thread that binds all the other characters are the Jewett brothers: Cain, Cob, and Chimney. At the start of the story, they and their pop, Pearl, are dirt-poor, starving tenant farmers.

When Pearl departs his mortal coil, the brothers leave to find their fortune in Canada. To finance their dream, they begin to rob banks and businesses in obeisance to their hero, Bloody Bill Bucket. Cain is the only one who learned to read. Over and over he read to his brothers the one book they had, a dime-novel about an adventurous scallawag, Bill Bucket. (When the book is finally lost, one of the brothers says that it doesn’t make any difference because they’ve all memorized it.)

Also running through the book are the stories of farmers Ellsworth and Eula Fiddler, fiddled out of their life savings by a traveling con man; sanitation inspector Jasper Cone, a lonely soul who takes his job seriously; Sugar, a poor black boy who ran away from his southern home to make it rich in Detroit and is now a poor black man running back to his childhood home; Lt. Bovard, a young man escaping a “Dear John” situation (and an incipient awareness that he is a homosexual) by joining the army and hoping to get sent to the Front for a glorious death; various inhabitants of The Whore Barn; and Pollard, a creepy bartender. Most of their stories take place in Ohio where their paths cross, however briefly.

As the brothers become more worldly and much more notorious, their poignant loyalty to each other remains. As the number of those who hunt them grows, it is easy to envision the inevitability of a Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid ending, but hope springs eternal that the Canada of their dreams is only a whisper away.

Pollock combines the grittiness, despair, humor, craftiness, resilience, cruelty, and compassion of ordinary people to make a strangely wonderful novel. His strength lies in his ability to juggle the stories of so many disparate people in an artful but natural way and in his superior writing skills. Pollock says one of the tricks he used to learn how to write was to take a short work by a master writer and type it out. He learned structure and dialogue by doing this. Later he learned what voice suited him best.

Pollock can intimately put us within the impoverished world of the mostly illiterate southern tenant farmer and the middle class one of a college-educated military man. He can describe the daily humiliation of being black and poor. He can show us big and small examples of the devil’s work, demon rum, and godforsaken poverty.

Here's a little story within the grander one:

Cob didn’t say anything. In fact, it is doubtful that he heard a word that was being said, for he was now holding a ham the size of a newborn infant. It was like something he’d imagine you’d find on the heavenly table, in between the roast beef and the spare ribs, but instead it was right here, in his dirty hands. He had heard Pearl talk about sin and gluttony and false riches enough to know he should toss it to the ground and stomp it, but, shit, what would be the sense of doing that now? He had just killed a man. He was going to hell anyway. Raising it up to his mouth, he tore a big hunk off with his teeth and began to chew.

MBTB star!

The Asset by Shane Kuhn

Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $26

“The Asset” is an thriller. A shadowy evil is threatening to terminate the United States with extreme prejudice. The only one who can save us is Kennedy, an expert in airport security. Does Kennedy have a last name? It speaks to author Shane Kuhn’s plain, straightforward style that it seems irrelevant to dwell on the last names of characters who exist primarily for their function. Even those characters who have whole names distill to their “Cher”-like monikers immediately.

It’s misleading of me to imply that Kennedy has no history and is merely a contrivance to move the plot forward. Kuhn gives him a background, a motivation to do what he does and be the loner he is. (When a love interest -- whose one name is "Love" -- pops up, Kennedy easily moves into that state of being, so we know he’s not a complete loner.) But for the most part, Kennedy exists to move the plot forward, as do the other characters who slot themselves into the characters necessary to form an operations team, which is a bit of a cliché.

Where Kuhn escapes the cliché is in the story. He takes us behind the scenes of a sometimes clumsy TSA and a nasty version of Homeland Security, represented by a nasty agent, and a CIA in which one of the many hands can escape notice of the other hands, represented by an agent who co-opts Kennedy onto a hastily constructed team. And Kuhn’s fictional universe is interesting.

Kennedy is the only person who can install a piece of machinery into airport scanning machines that will help the CIA defeat criminal mastermind Lentz, who is planning something nefarious. Kennedy and his team run afoul of one setback (or traitorous act) after another, and that’s the story. Once again, it’s the fictional inside look at security organizations (however far-fetched) and the running of the machinery that provides a thin shield against acts of terrorism that provides the page-turning oomph.

The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris

Seventh Street Books, 240 pages, $15.95

The very interesting website, Lost Manuscripts, explains the tale of Hemingway’s missing suitcase. It is upon this true story that Shaun Harris builds his darkly funny, criminal-road-trip-in-Mexico story, “The Hemingway Thief.”

In a nutshell, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife packed all of his stories, carbons and all, into a suitcase, which was then stolen at a Paris train station. The as-yet-unpublished Ernest had to start from scratch, and we know how that turned out.

In contemporary times, an author, Henry “Coop” Cooper, has gone to Mexico to contemplate killing himself. In a strictly literary sense. His alias, Toulouse Velour, a scribbler of vampire love stories, must die, so Coop, the serious author, can live. Alas, Toulouse is a golden goose. His public and his publisher love him. His public pictures him as a shimmering goddess. Instead, he is a beer-swilling, pot-toking loser. The “serious author” in him is crying to be let out. Unfortunately, the “serious author” hasn’t written a damn thing while in his sleepy Mexican hideaway.

What Coop has accomplished is to get to know another American ex-pat, the local hotelier, Grady Doyle. It is in Grady’s bar one fine day that two villains come to roust a young man who has passed out at one of Grady’s tables. The young man is Eben Milch and, without knowing his story, Grady and a reluctant Coop come to his rescue. All three men now have acquired a serious enemy, Newton Thandy, a shady antiquarian. And now the three men are on the run, running from Thandy and running towards the fabled suitcase of Hemingway’s manuscripts.

Shaun Harris must have had a great time naming his characters. Digby is the hotel handyman who proves to be oh-so-much more. Pièta is a hitwoman. El Cuerno (The Horn) is a villain. Dutch is a weed grower extraordinaire. Elmo is the wise man on the mountain, or at least the philosopher on the mount. You get the idea perhaps that Harris has some wacky times planned for his adventurers.

Harris’ tale was fun to read, although during times of one-sentence exchanges, his characters were sometimes indistinguishable from each other. “The Hemingway Thief” reminded me of Johnny Shaw’s books, wacky and action-filled, but Shaw’s books have more depth and narrative strength. This would be a good book to read while on vacation in Mexico.

Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham

Mulholland Books, 400 pages, $26

Once again, in his latest entry in the O’Loughlin-Ruiz series set in England, author Michael Robotham concentrates more on psychologist Joseph O’Loughlin than on retired police detective Vincent Ruiz. I prefer the Ruiz stories, because Joe’s life is more to be pitied (and I’m not referring to his Parkinson’s disease) than Ruiz’s pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-off one. Robotham can write Joe’s thoughts with more flourish and nuance, so he’s the more obvious literary choice. Despite my leaning heavily in favor of Ruiz’s stories, “Close Your Eyes,” the tenth in the series, is both exciting and poignant. And Ruiz makes a small but significant appearance.

The story thus far: Joseph O’Loughlin was a successful practicing psychologist in London, with a wife and two young girls. A dark cloud hovered over him briefly when he was a suspect in a murder investigation carried on by DI Vincent Ruiz. Joe and Ruiz have become best friends over the course of the books. They are as close as brothers, while being physically, temperamentally, and intellectually different. Ruiz has had many wives. Joe’s marriage has crumbled, although he carries tattered hopes that one day it might be patched up. Early on, at much too young an age, Joe was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. His symptoms have steadily gotten worse, but not enough to curtail a limited involvement with police activities, even though Ruiz has retired. Before the breakup, Joe and his family moved to a quaint village near Bath, but after the breakup, he returned to London to work.

In summing up this time, Joe says, “I am not the same person I was a decade ago. Existence has become infinitely more complex and less joyful.”

Joe’s sorrow over his domestic situation has haunted the books. He loves his daughters and longs for his wife. They are his weakness and occasionally have been in peril because of that. Joe is surprised when his wife, the eternally perfect and unobtainable Julianne, asks him to move in for the summer to help take care of the girls while they are on school holiday. Their oldest, Charlie, has just graduated and is contemplating a college major in forensic psychology, following in her father’s footsteps. This is daunting to both her parents, because she was kidnapped and traumatized when she was younger by one of her father’s foes. Nevertheless, she talks her father into letting her help — mostly by driving — him with his latest case.

Against his better judgment, Joe has answered a call from Veronica Cray, DCS of the serious crime squad and Ruiz’s antagonistic ex-colleague. In a case a little too close to home, a mother and teenage daughter have been killed. Soon Joe and the police figure out that it is part of a series of crimes that have been growing in gravity and intensity. Joe would pull back from this investigation were it not for the presence of “The Mindhunter,” a third-rate, ex-psychology student of his. Because of The Mindhunter's ill-advised efforts, the case suffers a setback. Although Joe now has other personal worries and responsibilities, he throws his weight behind the investigation.

As the complexities of the case continue to rise, Joe ponders how difficult it actually may be to solve a case in which there are now many more players and suspects. He muses:

Up until now I’ve had some vague notion that I might stumble upon the key that unlocks this crime — a cache of family papers, or a diary, or a bundle of love letters — but nothing is going to arrive in the post or fall into my lap.

Robotham is good at presenting thrilling conclusions to his books. This one is no exception and is further compounded by an untenable dilemma at the end that will bring out the hankies. This is another wonderful book by Michael Robotham in a series about a man who constantly has to make difficult moral choices. Welcome to Joe’s world.