Kings of the Earth: A Novel [Hardcover]

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

The timeline of this story ranges from the early 1930's up to 1990. As we go back and forth in time we learn about the upbringing and lives of 3 illiterate and eccentric brothers, all born and raised on the family farm in upstate New York. Vernon, Audie and Creed Proctor have lived their entire lives on the farm and have shared the same bed for most of their lives. At the start of this fascinating novel, the year is 1990 and we find out that Vernon, the oldest brother, has died in this communal bed. At first it seems like Vernon has died from natural causes (they are all elderly), but then the medical examiner makes a startling finding that he believes Vernon died from strangulation.

Suspicion thus falls on the remaining two brothers. There is Creed, the only one to have (briefly) lived away from the farm during the time he served in Korea. But there is also the mentally challenged Audie. They are both interviewed by State Trooper Del Graham - a decent man who cares about the Proctors and also wants to see justice done. The Proctors are aided by neighbor Preston Hatch and his wife Margaret. Preston has known the boys their whole lives and feels both compassion and pity for them, and has always tried to help them when they were in need.

Other important narrators include Donna Proctor, the sister, who was the only one to leave the farm and receive a college education. We also hear from Donna's son Tom, and her husband DeAlton - both of them unscrupulous and involved in growing and selling marijuana from the family farm. We also hear from their mother Ruth and their abusive father Lester, as we learn about the boys' upbringing starting in the 1930's.

The story is told is short chapters, alternating between time periods and by character. We are constantly jumping around in time and this can be a bit disorienting, but it is deliberate and John Clinch is such a talented writer that he pulls this off beautifully. It's funny because there is mention in the book of a jigsaw puzzle, and that's what I thought about this book. The lives of these characters is a puzzle - and we get bits and pieces of the puzzle and it is only at the end when we put them all together that we see the whole picture. And an amazing picture it is.

When I first starting reading this novel I kept thinking I had read this story before. I soon came to realize (and the author discusses this in the Acknowledgements) that it was inspired by the true-life case of the Ward brothers, depicted in the documentary Brother's Keeper.

I highly recommend this novel. I thought it was an absolute page-turner and just beautifully written. I found myself constantly rereading various passages, just because they were so evocative and insightful. There were many descriptions so spot-on I could just picture them. One short example: "They heard her car coming and they looked up in unison like cows."

In many ways this is a difficult novel to read because the lives of these men was at times so painful - they were so reclusive and lived in such squalor. They were true throwbacks to another time and place. Even though their story is heartbreaking, it is told with such skill and with such psychological acuity that when you turn that last page you are left feeling like you've met real flesh and blood characters. Which it turns out you have.

Highly recommended.

With this second novel, Clinch has established himself as a gifted storyteller of rural American life. Like Faulkner and McCarthy, he exposes the underbelly of the dispossessed with a nihilistic, gothic, and poetic style. Like Steinbeck, he portrays the marginal class pedigrees with compassion and wry social observance.

Finn, the author's first novel, was a fictional biography of Huck Finn's father--a savage, twisted man who bears no similarities to Twain's Pap. I was hooked from the merciless opening sentence to its ruthless last pages.

Clinch's new novel shares some of the same themes, characters, and features, such as a disenfranchised cast of people, a whiskey still, a house with a broken spine, a blind man, and a riverine terrain. This story is inspired by the true history of the Ward brothers of Munnsville, New York and the subsequent documentary, "My Brother's Keeper." Researching it on Wikipedia after I read the novel was a helpful complement to the story.

Three elderly brothers--Vernon, Audie, and Creed Proctor--live together on a dilapidated (that's an understatement) farm in upstate New York. One morning, on arising, Vernon is found dead in the bed he shares with his brothers. The investigation of his death in 1990 is the central subject matter of the story, which spans from 1932-1990.

Told in a chorus of voices in short chapters (sometimes one sentence, sometimes a few pages), the narrative alternates from one character to another, like a non-linear chronicle. The title of each chapter or heading is a character's name. These include the three brothers; their parents, Lester and Ruth; their sister, Donna; her husband DeAlton, and son, Tom; their neighbors Margaret and Preston; and law enforcement officer, Del Graham, as well as a smattering of others. Unlike the strictly third person POV used in Finn, the voices fluctuate between first and third person here. The reader is given back story and secondary plot through the eyes of the various voices, and the tension builds gradually as the links connect between past and present, between neighbor and kin, and between outsiders and inhabitants.

Clinch evokes an earthy, bleak sense of place in the farm settlement of Carversville, with its convoluted web of sinister and complex family dynamics. The grime-encrusted film that covers every skin and surface is so convincing that I could fairly smell the reek of filth saturating the story. He also provides some graphic scenes of the Proctors' agrarian life, including a mishap of ice fishing and the slaughter of a pig, scenes that made me dizzy from its ferocity and immediacy. He strikes a taut equipoise between brutal and beautiful, lashing and lyrical.

There are conspicuous blemishes with the alternating viewpoints--the voices are not entirely consistent to character. The three brothers are illiterate, atavistic, and largely inchoate to others, especially Audie. When referred to by other characters, the reader perceives correctly their boorish and uncouth traits. However, when they spoke, they articulated with too much range, reflection, and harmony, which contradicted what we already knew about their natures and did not successfully differentiate them from other narrators.

In a pointillist construction, it is detracting when several narrators lack distinction. It created a static energy, particularly in the first half of the novel, when the reader is getting acquainted with the cast. The ensemble ran together despite the chapter identification. But when Clinch uses third person narration, it is impeccable. He isn't trying to be colloquial. That is when his prose soars and I felt the immediacy of events and surroundings.

Despite these structural flaws, I recommend this novel for its powerful atmospherics and compelling story. I look forward to Clinch's third novel.

In the acknowledgements at the end of his stunning new novel, KINGS OF THE EARTH, Jon Clinch says, "In literature as in life, we have a duty to see that nothing important should be lost." This is a hell of a good book - the kind of fiction we should be reading instead of the kind of fiction we generally are reading. KINGS OF THE EARTH is something fine and eloquent and moving, words written with precision and a brilliant clarity of heart to stave off loss- the loss of history, the loss of art, of humanity. True feeling seems to be out of fashion in contemporary fiction, and fiction is poorer for it. Disaffection and irony may be the tenor of the times, but brush too close too often and you begin to feel estranged and lonely. Fiction should embrace us, warm us, and make us more human and along comes Jon Finch and we feel that we are once again safe at home, in the hands of a master.

As he did in his wildly acclaimed first novel, FINN, a re-invention of Huck's story from the point of view of his bigoted drunken father, Clinch here takes on a familiar story, turns it inside out and gives it not just new life but new meaning.

In 1990, outside of a small town in upstate New York, William Ward, one of four reclusive, inseparable brothers who lived an isolated and antiquarian life on a rundown farm, died in the bed he shared with his three brothers in their filthy one-room farmhouse. His brother Delbert was eventually accused of strangling him in his sleep and put on trial for murder. The case pitted big city lawyers and high-tech criminal pathology against small town pride and privacy in a riveting way. Delbert was eventually acquitted, because it was concluded that his confession was coerced after hours of intense interrogation without the presence of a lawyer.

The case became the subject of an award-winning 1992 documentary, Brother's Keeper, which showed how squalid life can become and still miraculously be sustainable. A friend, watching it, said, "In a clean house, the doorknobs and the refrigerator handle always get dirty first. In their house, those are the only clean things, because at least they get touched."

This is the tale Clinch takes on, and he tells it from the shifting viewpoints of all the major characters. These are honest, concerned, unsophisticated, uniquely American voices, from the Proctor brothers - three of them in Clinch's telling, innocent, feral, filthy and shy - to their abiding neighbors, to the arresting officer, to the brothers' drug dealing nephew, who ultimately is their downfall. Their speech is not lyrical, but it has an honesty about it that transcends the poetic. Although the writing dazzles in places, the effect is cumulative, as opposed to pyrotechnic.

But, Whitmanesque, it can sometime take your breath away: "The work Audie loves the best, comes to life. The clouds clear and he switches off the flashlight and keeps going. The creaking grows louder the nearer he gets. A half a hundred voices raised in the night and crying out. The earth turns and the sun shines somewhere and the temperatures shift and the wind comes up and these things - these creatures, for what are they but created - these creatures cry out in their half a hundred voices." (p. 204)

And when he uses a figure of speech, he knocks it out of the park: "DeAlton narrowed his eyes into something you could slide a coin into." (p. 335)

But it is in the slow accumulation of detail that the novel dazzles. Nothing goes unnoticed; nothing is lost. From the whirlagig carvings of an illiterate man, to a string of frozen fish flopping back to life on a farmhouse floor, to the unexpectedly literate ramblings of a mother dying of cancer, to the piglow of a cigarette smoked at night in a hayloft, Clinch catches it all. Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness, Baudelaire said, and few writers have paid attention the way Clinch does.

In using the story of the brothers, Clinch is not appropriating; he is using the skeletal structure of the known to build the body of the unfathomably complex and yearning American character. It is a lonely character, a character formed by bleak surroundings and poverty and loss and drunkenness. But it is also filled with a kind of decency that is almost holy in its simplicity, its striving to keep what is from ever being lost. In Clinch country, no grave goes unattended, no honor to the living or dead is ever abandoned.

To say that this novel brings others to mind is not to denigrate it. It recalls the finest work of John Gardner, and Bruce Chatwin's ON THE BLACK HILL, another exploration of the bonds between brothers that go unspoken but never unexamined.

KINGS OF THE EARTH pulls off a miraculous feat rarely accomplished in literature - it becomes a story that is not told, but lived, a cry from the heart of the heart of the country, in Gass's phrase, simple, elemental, unsentimental but deeply felt, unschooled but never less than lucid. Clinch's is a voice that notices everything, every nuance, and values everything that emanates from the most barren landscape. Never mawkish, it never fails to elucidate and, finally, forgive, even as it mourns.

KINGS OF THE EARTH will not warm your heart, in that Oprah kind of way. It will not offer easy answers or sentimental morality to help your self-esteem. But it will enrich your life, deeply and profoundly. And surely, even now, that is a better thing?

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