Billed as a drunken punch up between Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver on the book's blurb, Knockemstiff is more likely to be a melding of John Steinbeck, Charles Bukowski and William Faulkner getting stoned and looking at porn while waiting for their welfare cheques to arrive in some 21st century Depression-hit Ohio.
Pollock's collection of short-stories are all set in the town of Knockemstiff, Ohio and focus on a fictional set of characters who are all cursed by their own limitations and self-delusion.
While American Lit has always attempted to push the boundaries and demonstrate 'space' be it physical (Herman Melville, Jack Keroauc) political ( Henry David Thoreau, John Steinbeck, Charlotte Perkins Gilman) or metaphysical (William S. Burroughs/Brion Gysin, William Gibson, Kurt Vonnegut) but this is more the America of Jim Thompson: Parochial, boring, small and claustrophobic.
Knockemstiff and its characters may be hurtling towards their oblivion, but first they're going to snort it, smoke it, fuck it or drink it.
Pollock manages to intersperse the bleak by finding humour in the banal and the ridiculous: middle-aged women batting flies away from shaving cuts on their legs, whacked out 20-something chicks walking round with their foodstuffs on their person or teenage boys getting wood for Nancy Sinatra on the Boots LP while their best friend gets pubic lice and banished to the garage.
Violence is pervasive in Knockemstiff. The men are t-shirt stained slobs with a penchant for casual violence save the oedipal breaks of Real Life and the marvellous Discipline. Kicks come from driving round and taking amphetamines called Black Beauties, or fantasising about women they can never have. Masculinity is portrayed in blunt brutal shapes, with beauty a distant destination and love a distant past. Women are subservient, downtrodden or subjugated to humiliation.
In a post-recession world in the wake of sub-prime mortgages, the manufacturing sector's bottom falling though and with the world inching ever closer towards the end of the 'American Century' and the American dream, Pollock's collection of short stories somehow reveals more about 21st Century American life than it lets on.
A country that has been synonymous with success, confidence and achievement is now dealing with unemployment and feelings of disempowerment. For all the machismo and swagger that comes through in the brutality of the yarn-spinning, the feeling is one of underachievement, emasculation and discontent:
"Dee was nothing more but patches of pimples and rolls of fat. The only thing she seemed capable of doing besides watching the tube was pointing out my defects. And even if she happened to be in a good mood, it was just as horrible.
"She got on this kick where she pretended to be a movie star, and she'd go on for hours about crab cakes and evening gowns and the sunset over some beach hideaway.
That she stayed with me was just one more sign of her indolence. In a more advanced society, they would have probably killed us both and fed our bodies to the dogs."
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