Customer Reviews

Kings of the Earth: A Novel

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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?

KINGS OF THE EARTH, the second novel by Jon Clinch (Finn) provides moments that roar like a tractor and others as quiet as fish swimming under ice. Clinch tells this story with multiple narrators, the focus being the lives of the Proctor brothers, their parents, and sister over the course of sixty years (1930-1990). Poverty and denial and ignorance and will reign supreme on the homestead of the Proctor family. They have an alcoholic father, a long-suffering mother, the three boys to raise, and then the gift of a sister.

Clinch knows his farms, every cow, pig, turkey, and the excrement they create. The Proctor household is not much concerned with cleanliness. The boys grow into men. Their odoriferous ways are a town fable. Life goes on despite bad weather and family tragedy: someone has to do the chores, even on the day law enforcement decides the eldest of the brothers (Vernon) did not die in his sleep but was murdered. The likeliest suspects are brothers Creed and Audie. Audie has always been "different," with the probability that he is autistic before there was such a term to describe him. His own father had wished Audie dead on more than one occasion. And Creed has a superior air to him since his time in Korea exposed him to a larger world. But it is Vernon's body found in the bed the three men share.

This odd fact, that three old men share one bed, is central to the novel. Add in the ways of the modern world, a nephew interested in becoming a big-time pot grower and seller, a zealous deputy, and a cast of distinct townsfolk and relatives and you have a book that is intriguing, harsh, dark, and uniquely told. How much can man endure? KINGS OF THE EARTH reveals the answer to that question depends a lot on the man (woman), their belief in hard work, their family support, and as with Donna, the vision to see another way of life.

I love a book that makes me reach for tissues when I turn the final page because I don't want to leave that world behind. Clinch carries the suspense, the eccentricity, and the pride of the Proctor family from page one to the end. Unless there's a volume 2 out there for me, I will be reading this book again soon. KINGS OF THE EARTH introduced me to characters I do not want to let go of. KINGS OF THE EARTH is complex and spare, raw and brilliant.

and Jon Clinch has chosen one of the hardest. And I think he's been mostly successful.

An old man, one of three brothers, two of whom have lived all their lives on a poor farm in upstate New York, is found dead in the bed he shares with the two others. Cause of death could be almost anything. Vernon may have had cancer, or may have just died from natural causes after a hard life farming, raising cows, and operating a still. Or, he may have been killed by one of his brothers. And IF he had been killed - suffocated while asleep was the opinion - was he killed as a "mercy" to put him out of his misery OR had he been killed because his miseries were a pain for his brothers to deal with? The law steps in and maybe/possibly coerces a confession from one of the brothers. There is also a subplot about the brothers' nephew who has advanced the family's illegal liquor activity to growing and selling marijuana.

Clinch tells the story of the three brothers, their extended family, their neighbors, and the law department of the small town they lived in. Beginning at Vermon's death in 1990, Clinch writes in many voices and in both the first and third persons.His chapters are short. He also takes the reader back and forth, from 1932 to 1990. For those readers who like/want a straightforward tale told, this is not the book for them. I happened to enjoy the divergent voices and times and even the same story told from one or more points of view.

Clinch has based his novel on the true story of an old man found dead in similar circumstances, around the same time and place. The Ward family was the subject of a movie documentary, "Brother's Keeper".

The Proctors are a family who are living a way of life that has long since died even within the context of this book. One of Jon Clinch's repeated quotes, "You owe some things to the dead even if they're not your own dead," resonates throughout the pages of Kings of the Earth. For me, Kings had a similar feel to Comac McCarthy's The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2009) (Vintage International). I found a desolate landscape where there were few people who really seemed to understand one another. I found a place where memories of the past were easily crushed by the needs and problems of the present; it was a place where beauty was found in the simplicity of a brother's carvings or in the milking of cows or even in neighborly love.

You will not find a fast paced thriller in Kings of the Earth.

You will not find philosophical musings of men who are lost in the depth and expanse of ivory towers

I think you may find something both mystical and mythical with Clinch's story. Kings of the Earth is not written on a time line, per se. The book takes place both in the past and the present and details are filled as Clinch provides a peering into how the Proctor family was built and how that same family came to embody a seeming sense of ignorant solitude. Without trying to give too much away, the story isn't just about these brother-farmers who seem to be oblivious to the world around them. Still, what comes across is that we might not understand what we might owe to the dead. Clinch does this in such a masterful was as to not promote guilt, but an aching heart for a family who is familiar with sorrow but who also, ultimately, die as other such ways of life that have been abandoned.

This is going to be the book I evangelize this year. I'm already shoving it into the hands of mere acquaintances and my friends are on notice. I'm lucky to have a book club at work so it will be a selection there.

This is one of those novels, too rare for my taste, that combines a fascinating story with exquisite language and blends the result into one of the best novels you'll read this year or, many years for that matter. The book rests on a foundation so profound, so meaningful and so beautifully ordinary that I sometimes had trouble breathing as I read.

I read the quite dark novel Finn when it was first out...struck by how strong and engaging it was. This new novel does several things: shows that the second novel curse needn't apply; shows that Clinch has a confident ability; and gives the best answer I can think of to critics such as David Shields, and now Lee Siegel, who claim that the novel is irrelevant and tedious. No need to recap the basic story line or the multi-voice manner of telling the story. Instead I want to express the hope that Mr. Clinch continues to write novels that are in his voice and style. We might be circling around Stewart O'Nan territory here, maybe some Ron Carlson tossed in, or a New England sort-of Cormac McCarthy, and yes, there are echoes of Faulkner. However, my strong suspicion is that Clinch has already carved out his own place in American letters.

Several reviewers of Kings of the Earth have cited the similarity to Faulkner's, As I Lay Dying. I see this more as a Greek tragedy set in a rural U.S. community. The story, narrated in first and third person voices, covers over fifty years in the lives of three illiterate and eccentric brothers who live isolated and insulated lives in a ram shackled house that lacks insulation.

Author Clinch has created a fictionalized version of a real life 1992 case in which one brother was accused and tried for murdering his sibling. The story is told in short chapters by various characters and moves back and forth in time. The book offers the reader a bi-polar reading experience. On the plus side, Mr. Clinch's portrait of the attitudes and actions of people living in a small village-like atmosphere are evocative of a simpler time while his descriptions of the brothers and their surroundings are so vivid you can almost smell and feel the dirt and desolation pouring from the pages. As for the negative aspects of the book, there were just too many voices adding their "two cents worth" (even people long dead spoke) and the jumps back a forth in time were disconcerting to say the least.

Even though the brothers and their neighbors appear to be able to "make lemonade" from the plethora of lemons in their lives, overall this book will never make my list of all-time favorites. It's not that I demand happily ever after from my reading material but for me this offering, though well written, is just too melancholy, the lives and surroundings of the characters too oppressive. The fact that the title of the novel comes from the book of Revelation is in itself revealing. Perhaps the message is that no matter who we are or where we live, we can never escape divine wrath.

KINGS OF THE EARTH

Mystery and questions are with you every inch of the way while reading this masterful book by Jon Clinch. Based on the true story of the Ward brothers of New York state this book kept me wondering and guessing. I will think about this book for a long time.

Meet the three Proctor brothers, Vernon, Creed, and Audie, born and raised on a farm by a loving mother and an abusive and hard drinkin' daddy. The three boys are thick as thieves and never leave the farm or each other their entire long lives. Their baby sister, Donna, goes away to school, marries, and makes her own life, all the while loving and worrying about her bizarre big brothers. These three men don't even own a truck or a car, they travel everywhere on their tractor, rain or shine. They themselves are filthy dirty and smell like last week's trash. Yet, one cannot help liking and caring for the three of them and wishing the best for each of them.

Clinch takes us on a journey dating from the 1930's to 1990. Told in many unique voices, each chapter is told by a different character. Clinch has the gift of making each character's narration extraordinary and distinct. Some of these chapters are one sentence, a paragraph or two, or several pages. This was a format that I thoroughly enjoyed and found refreshing.

The book opens with Audie's explantion that Vernon has went on ahead. Vernon had been sick and has passed during the night. But what first appears to be a simple natural cause of death has turned into a maybe murder -- who is the guilty party? Creed, who has killed before while serving time in Korea? Or Audie, the mentally challenged brother? Does anyone know what Audie and Creed are truly capable of? Could it have been a murder by an intruder? Or was Vernon's death natural?

Clinch writes with such ease and so beautifully. While the plot of this book hops from past to present and back and forth constantly, this was not confusing in the least and added much intrigue to the story. We are introduced to many characters with their own story to add -- the three brothers Vernon, Audie, and Creed, along with their sister, Donna. Add to the mix their dad Lester and mother Ruth, each telling their stories each with a different point of view.

We meet the brother's forever neighbor, Preston. While he finds the brothers eccentric, doesn't care for the squalor of their living conditions, and the pure oddness of them, he cannot help himself and is constantly taking care of them, helping them out of all sorts of situations and being a kind and considerate friend and neighbor.

Add into this mix the nephew of the three brothers, Tom, who deals grass and takes full advantage of his uncles and their ignorance. Tom gets into the dealing scene hot and heavy with consequences that will affect not only his life, but the lives of his entire family.

This book reads smooth and easy. The writing is superb and exciting. Clinch's gift of writing is a joy to read. The magic he works with words!

I am looking forward to reading Clinch's other book, FINN. If you enjoy a book based on true circumstances, with writing that is solid gold, characters you can identify with, and a story line that good to go, this is a book for you. I highly recommend it!

Thank you.

Pam