'Kings of the Earth': three eccentric brothers, a primitive life, a mysterious death

'Kings of the Earth'

by Jon Clinch

Random House, 393 pp., $26

"On a farm you live around death your whole life," says one of the characters in Jon Clinch's mesmerizing novel "Kings of the Earth"; it's a plainspoken statement that sums up the book — and a way of life. Ranging from the 1930s to 1990 and back again, the novel uses many voices to tell the story of three brothers, and how death briefly threatened to change a life that was seemingly unchangeable.

Vernon, Audie and Creed Proctor lived on the same rural New York farm their entire lives, in companionable squalor. Though friendly with their immediate neighbors, "the boys" generally remain isolated on their property — their primitive view of life, not to mention their stench, made them the local eccentrics. One morning, the brothers woke in the filthy bed they had shared since childhood to find that Vernon, the oldest, had died; or, in Audie's words, "went on ahead."

Local law enforcement suspect foul play, and suddenly Audie and Creed are dragged into a world as foreign to them as the "Dragnet" reruns they watch on their ancient, flickering TV.

The story is based loosely on the case of the real-life Ward brothers, whose murder trial became the subject of an acclaimed 1992 documentary "Brother's Keeper." But Clinch, in his second novel (after 2007's "Finn"), is less interested in plot and legalities than in minds. "Kings of the Earth" is structured as a series of brief narratives by many characters, spanning many decades: the brothers; their closest neighbors, Preston and Margaret; their parents, Lester and Ruth; their sister, Donna (the only one of their generation to leave the farm and try a different life) and her husband and son, and the suspicious yet sympathetic state trooper.

These passages meet up and overlap like worn-soft patchwork, creating a vivid picture of first three, then two men content in a life of hard work and little comfort. Donna, asked to explain her brothers' closeness, says that they "stuck together in a way that most people don't any more. A way that most people probably can't even imagine ... Sometimes she thought they had a kind of group consciousness, if that made any sense."

We're given detailed portraits of a pig slaughter, of the bone-chilling cold of an uninsulated farmhouse, of what sheets look like when they haven't been laundered in decades, of how these old men appeared to an outside eye. (They move "like the ghosts of drowned men traversing the ocean floor. Their pale hair and their pale beards wavered in the light wind as on deep currents." ) Clinch's language is simple and his sentences rhythmic, like an old storyteller spinning a familiar yarn at leisure in front of a fire, and from it these characters gain an unexpected nobility.

"Kings of the Earth" occasionally falters, in a subplot involving Donna's family that's less compelling than that the Proctor brothers' story (though intertwined with it). But overall, it's the sort of book you race through then read again more slowly, savoring each voice. Preston, the kindly neighbor who cheerfully admits he doesn't entirely understand the Proctors, says, "Where a man comes from isn't enough. You've got to go all the way back to the seed of a man and the planting of it, and a person can't go back that far ever I don't think." Clinch goes back to that seed and that planting, and readers will eagerly go with him.

Moira Macdonald is the movie critic of The Seattle Times.