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National Book Award Finalist Andrew Krivak’s new novel, Mule Boy, is a lyrical exploration of the unending burden of childhood trauma. Apart from its first three pages, the story is told in first-person by Ondro Prach, a solitary man in his 70s who, as a 13-year-old, was the sole survivor of a 1929 Pennsylvania coal mine collapse.
The narrator, whose first name is the Slovak equivalent of the author’s first name, proceeds as an oral storyteller does, unfolding his tale as he breathes. It is an inexorable flow of current and remembered scenes and dialogue, turning back on itself in time in recursive waves of increasing detail.
Looking back, Ondro narrates the harrowing story of growing up in “the patch”, a bleak company town adjacent to the coal mine. He tells of waiting in the pre-dawn dark to descend, inside the elevator cage, into an even darker world.
Ondro worked his way toward becoming a “mule boy: – a child who guides the mules, stabled underground and difficult to control, that pull carloads of anthracite up to the surface. He ultimately works as a mule boy for a team of two employee-miners and two “butties”, or subcontractors, of the mine owner.
The author shares his deep knowledge of the brutal business of coal mining in 1929. At age 11, Ondro becomes a “nipper’” a child who sits in the mine’s perfect dark listening for coal cars and, at just the right moment, pushes open the mine’s gangway door to let them through on their way to the top.
At age 12, Ondro is promoted to “spragger”, a child who uses his sprag, a three-pound club, “to slow or stop the coal car by jamming [the sprag] into the wheels of the load as it coursed along the gangways in the dark.” Being a nipper or a spragger is dangerous work, where grave mishaps too often afford other children the opportunity to rise to become a mule boy.
On Ondro’s first day as a mule boy, the mine roof collapses in a slow roll, leaving the four adults, the child, and the mule isolated in flawless darkness, relieved only sporadically by carbide headlamps. Early in the tale, Ondro manages, in a gruesome manner, to escape after the four adults and the mule slowly, each in their own turn, perish. The remainder of the story consists of Ondro’s narration of his life under the enduring weight of this trauma.
Krivak presents a dramatic tale in an entirely unconventional manner, making this novel stand out in a spectacular way. The story unfolds in a narrative cadence, embedding illuminating flashbacks and filling in details as an oral storyteller would.
Yet this is not what makes Mule Boy truly outstanding. Krivak’s writing style is paratactic, meaning the author uses only juxtaposed independent clauses, without subordinating one idea or fact to another or offering causal or other explanations.
Moreover, because the novel contains no periods, the reader might consider this a novel of one sentence. However, after querying the intended import of there being no period after the novel’s final word, the author responded in an email that Mule Boy “is not a novel-length sentence. It is a story that has sought in its telling to remove itself entirely from the mind and the world of the sentence.” This is a novel with no sentences.
The author uses commas to mimic the storyteller’s breath as they spin a yarn—or narrate a life story. His use of parataxis engenders a stark, cinematic immediacy. While the style may be seen as typifying Ernest Hemingway‘s writing, the better comparison is to Cormac McCarthy. Like McCarthy, Krivak breaks complex actions, narrated in strings of independent clauses, into their elemental parts. Ondro does not make himself a cup of tea, for example, but rather:
“… I rise from my bed and go into the kitchen and lift the stove lid with the lifter to raise a small fire for my tea…with the coals that have burned down overnight, …raise them back to life with some birch-bark kindling … and the fire catches…and I place a kettle for the hot water on the stove and leave it and go wash my face and put on a clean shirt and trousers and slide my rosary into my pocket and come back to the kitchen…”
Krivak renders Ondro’s life beautifully, with its surprising turns, the recurring references to Jonah swallowed by the great fish, just as Ondro was swallowed by the mine, and Ondro telling the miners’ descendants, 60 years on, about their loved ones’ last words and final moments. The author’s extraordinary writing, without sentences, rather than a gimmick or distraction, provides a fluid narrative pulse that impels the reader forward through looping time and increasingly granular backstory, all of which comprise a storyteller’s profound tale, elegantly told.
FROM THE POPMATTERS ARCHIVES
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R.P. Finch
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