The fact is that Pollock is a 5th or 6th rate Raymond Carver wannabe. But, with a caveat. He is not a 5th rate Carver, the master storyteller, but a 5th rate Carver, the drunk whose mass of mediocre stories had to be reworked furiously by a number of incompetent editors.

Now, the proof. Here is a brief summary and selection from the eighteen tales. The first tale is called "Real Life," and features characters that recur later in the book (a motif that occurs with multiple tales featuring differing recurring characters). I will not mention the names of the characters because there really is nothing individuated about them. The basics of this twelve page tale are that a derelict dad tries to impress his wimpy son by beating the hell out of a man at a drive-in theater in the 1960s.

There are the usual pointless asides, veering into the grotesque, that pepper the tale; such as the old carny trick of the mother of the tale trying to stick a hot dog down her throat without mussing her lipstick. There are the typical poorly wrought sentences, such as this, the narrator's description of his father: ‘For a few minutes, he stared at the screen and sank slowly into the padded upholstery like a setting sun.’ Why is it a bad sentence? Simple, it gilds the lily. Read this sentence: ‘For a few minutes, he stared at the screen and sank slowly into the upholstery.’ Note, this sentence is better, even though shorter, because a) there is no redundant modifier (padded - for all upholstery is padded, lest it would not be upholstery), and b) there is no adding on of a pointless cliché (like a setting sun). This example is merely one of dozens of examples of such amateurishly constructed sentences in the book.

This book is also larded with descriptions of characters that are pointless and veer into caricature for no purpose. When the father and the son first encounter the other man the father beats up, and his son, here is how Pollock describes the initial moment: ‘I zipped up and stepped out of the stall. The old man was handing a cigarette to a porky guy with sawdust combed through his greasy black hair. A purple stain shaped like a wedge of pie covered the belly of his dirty shirt.’ Now, this is bad writing not because the modifiers are redundant, nor because there are clichés - although greasy, black hair comes close. No, this is bad because these description exemplify one of the great flaws of modern Creative Writing Programs - the substitution of mere rote physical description for any relevance to the narrative, character development, or to serve as any setup to a future payoff at tale’s end.

In short, this description serves no purpose save to portray the cartoonish ideas of the main characters about the seemingly equally cartoonish secondary characters. The tale does not benefit one iota from the knowledge of the man with the smoke, the state of the man’s hair, nor the color nor shape of the stain on the man’s shirt. While this, if it were the only instance of such a pointless digression, would not be a problem, in and of itself, the fact is that the tale, and the other seventeen tales that follow it in the book, consist mainly of such lackluster and pointless detailing substituting for any depth or insight into the characters.