Book Review: Mule Boy

Amelia Christmas Gramling

“A Feeling on the Body I Know”: Mule Boy
Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press, 2026; 186 pp; $17.99

In the last chapter of Andrew Krivak’s Mule Boy, one of the novel’s central characters recalls that the mining patch in Pennsylvania where she’s from is “a place known only for a day …” 

That day, of course, is a day of unmitigated catastrophe, localized apocalypse, the 1929 New Year’s Mining Disaster in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, of which Ondro—the narrator and titular “Mule Boy”—is the sole survivor. The day subsumes the town and all its inhabitants. Ondro escapes the mine, but he remains trapped inside the instance of collapse. He is arrested, stagnant, inchoate; not the boy he was when he went down, but not a man with concrete subjectivity—what we might, in literary terms, call character—either. It is as if Ondro descends beneath several thousand tons of hollowed rock, and loses all claims to individuality in the coal mine’s primordial murk. He emerges carrying “a dark wholly absent of light, like a beast carrying its burden along a steel track.” 

The novel’s first-person narration, then, isn’t like being invited into a consciousness so much as it is like joining Ondro, for a while, shoulder-to-shoulder, in the darkness. The book is written in a single sentence, and Krivak—like his literary forebear, Cormac McCarthy—repudiates quotation marks. The syntax is liquid, the narration slippery, the “I” amorphous; it is difficult to parse the miner from the mine, the rhythm of the prose from the rhythm of the shaft’s relentless “heartbeat throb,” the presence of the living from the echoes of the dead.  

Welcome to coal country. 

In Kentucky, where I’m from, we have our fair share of places that are known “only for a day” if they are known at all. Last spring, I taught my New York students Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” and I asked them, by way of introduction, what they knew about Appalachia. If they knew anything, they knew the tragic—the abject poverty, the opioid crisis, and what more than one of my students euphemistically called the “backwards politics” of the place. 

And it’s true that whatever we might call “American progress,” its politics or its aesthetics, has steered largely clear of rural Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky—despite the fact that these tragic places accrue tragedies because they have unilaterally supplied the raw materials from which that progress is hewn. 

Coal towns are uniquely insulated and uniquely insular, not just because they are mono-economic, or mono-cultural, but because their inhabitants are given over to the monumentality of the undertaking: taking a pickax to a mountain, mining the earth. The individual isn’t extricable from the collective, because no one escapes the brutality of the labor, and no one is free from its cost. Krivak, as Ondro, returns again and again to the Book of Jonah, to the Old Testament, as if out of a need to explain the mine, the town, and the disaster incurred: 

And so he [Jonah] crosses the vast city and speaks of God’s anger, and the Ninevites repent and believe, as though they have come from darkness into a light, and they cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes, a feeling on the body I know, a feeling every miner with a coal stove knew, a feeling every miner’s child whose job it was to empty those ashes from the stove knew as well, the weight of them, the burned-off sulfur smell of them, the scratch of cinders to the arms and body when they got inside your clothes and worked their way along your waist and back after you had dumped them on the ash heap, yes, every miner and miner’s child knew this ancient feeling of repentance as surely as they knew the need to keep warm…

The Old God, and The Old World, are not so easily forgotten in this place, and what is buried tends to return.

Where the prose style is maximal, the plot is deceptively simple, Scriptural. We begin in Ondro’s old age, in a small cabin in New Hampshire, his adopted home, at the edge of a “mountain that will never be mined.” Ondro is visited by the surviving family of a man who perished in the disaster. After several decades, the family has come looking for answers. The first visitation sets a precedent, and before the novel is over, Ondro will be visited by all the families that remain, in some form, to ask. 

He is called upon to recount to each survivor the last moments their father or grandfather lived, and slowly, through reminiscence, the reader learns not only what happened all those years ago beneath the earth, but also what has become of Ondro in the aftermath of disaster. His abortive attempts at university education, his annulled marriage to Magda (the daughter of a miner who perished in the collapse), his alcoholism, and his imprisonment after refusing conscription for the Second World War: “this was why I would not serve, would not fight, would not go to war, because I had seen death in men’s faces, in their eyes by the light of nothing more than a carbide lamp shining from the peak of a cap, and I carried the faces of those men with me each day of my life…”

The questions which propel the novel are twofold: How did Ondro survive, and how, trapped in the prison of his survival, will he live? 

In answering the latter, Krivak mines his own life. Growing up stifled and bullied in rural Pennsylvania, he turned to books as a means of escape and a mode of meaning-making. Likewise, Ondro, insofar as he is saved, is saved by reading. The only class he loves and never skips during his doomed tenure in academia is Professor Elias Gray’s class on Shakespeare, “because Shakespeare and Professor Gray seemed completely out of place in that college of engineering, and yet there they were, writing of and speaking of tragedy, ambition, love, and the struggle … the old Greeks called the agon…” 

Later, in prison, he explores the ancient philosophers by way of a prophet-like fellow prisoner named Jacobson, who specializes in Plutarch, Maimonides, and Parmenides—and has a preternatural talent for smuggling illicit texts. It is from this period of isolated study and reflection that Ondro, and the reader, receive one of the central metaphors through which Ondro’s trauma—his state of permanent darkness—can be made legible, even livable. 

Parmenides, per Jacobson, theorized that we have nothing to fear from death, because “to become nothing is impossible and that what matters is the being our bodies consist of and that death is simply a change, Nor is there a way in which what-is could be / More here and less there, since all inviolably is…”  

Throughout the novel, Ondro is haunted by his own survival, unable to reconcile why he lived when the others perished. But Parmenides (per Jacobson) offers relief from this burden by suggesting that his fate was unavoidable, because it couldn’t have been otherwise, i.e., “all inviolably is.” 

The men in the collapsed mine shaft weren’t lost, but changed, transmuted into another state. Like the rosary Ondro has carried with him since childhood—anointed by Ondro’s father, the beads blackened by coal—Ondro, himself, was anointed by the men he left behind in the darkness. He carries them still.

There is a simplicity to this resolution but also a profound sadness, the implications of which are hinted at, but—at least by my reading—never quite fully explored. 

Krivak’s prose style is stunning, and yet a novel-in-one-sentence makes for a rather slim epic. I longed, quite simply, for more. Krivak’s power lies in his unrelenting, hypnotic descriptions—the obsession with cataloging, in exquisite detail, the raw materials and manual labors by which Ondro fills his days. The lack of punctuation and the aural quality of the prose lends itself to a loftiness, a buoyancy, a lovely horizontality, but not often to a penetration of depths. For instance, the reader is often told, in list form, the contents of Ondro’s reading, but we don’t linger long enough on any text to witness Ondro probe, argue, or wrestle. Indeed, books, despite the fact that the novel is replete with them, mostly inhabit the world as objects. 

Likewise, Ondro recounts the facts of his life as one pointing out landmarks; he circles events and characters in concentric maneuvers, but rarely lands. A distance remains between him (and so, us) and the narrative itself.

 At times this distance is frustrating, even tantalizing, as when Ondro, in comparing himself to Jonah, muses: “And Jonah must be taught with questions, as though a child, taught about God’s mercy and magnanimity, which aren’t meant to be questions but reminders of mercy and magnanimity … because I needed in those days to put more than the memory of being in the mine in front of me, needed to be reminded of mercy and magnanimity.” Which questions? Which reminders? Which days? On what basis, precisely, does Ondro fear or desire the comparison with Jonah? When does he talk to God? 

And then there is the distance between Ondro and Magda—Ondro’s love interest, whose father died in the collapse, and who Ondro’s alcoholism drives away shortly after their marriage. Magda, like all the characters in Mule Boy, strikes me as a bit shadowy, blurred, as if sketched from a very great height, and never more so than at the end of the novel when, as an old woman, she returns to Ondro on his mountain refuge and finally asks him to recount the last moments of her father’s life. In fact, Magda’s shadowiness, her sense of not quite thereness, permeates the story; it’s diegetic: Ondro compares Magda to a “flash of shadow … the opposite of a flash of light.” When she appears, he can’t accept her solidity, her reality, that she’s not a vision or a ghost: “even after I have felt her presence and seen her in the chair, I think for a moment she may yet be a flash of shadow, so I look up at the top of the mountain as if to clear my sight and back at the chair beneath the tree and she is still there….”

And while Ondro may ultimately be convinced of her presence, the reader never quite is. Magda tells her story—the luckless marriage she endured after she left, her disconnection from family, the loss of her mother–but as she narrates, her feelings, desires, and motivations stay inaccessible, elusive, vague. At one point she says, “All I’ve ever wanted was to love and be loved,” as simple as a child, as cliched as a dream. 

But it is precisely those cliches, those universalities, that we return to at the end if we’re lucky (or unlucky) enough to see the end’s approach—as Magda does in her old age, as her father did trapped with Ondro in the mine’s “seventh breast.” Disasters—private or collective—are not characterizing. We fall on cliches, we recite childhood prayers, we repeat the names of loved ones we’ll never see again. Krivak is not interested in exploring character as an individual phenomenon (the phenomenon of the individual). He’s interested in exploring the character of disaster, how disaster flattens and pluralizes, how disaster can become inextricable from a family, a town, or a region (i.e., Coal Country)—or as is increasingly true in 2026, an era. 

I am not the first reviewer to refer to this novel as elegiac, but I don’t think what’s being lamented here are the miners, but the act of mining itself, how the labor once put us in physical contact with the darkness, with the monumentality, intimacy, and material reality of the earth. We still mine now, but at a significant remove, by way of machines remotely operated (coincidentally, the same means by which we wage war). 

At the end of the novel, Ondro tries to recite an Ave Maria as he did in childhood, “but he doesn’t remember the words anymore, then thinks it’s not the prayer or the sound of the prayer but the feel of the [rosary] wood that changes him.” The words aren’t important. The words obfuscate, elide, put distance between us and another, between us and the land. Through words, Krivak delivers us beyond words, back to the raw materials, the wood, the rock, the water, and our human hands moving and moved by the earth. Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.