“It was as if time folded over on itself.”
So remarks Ondro Prach when, in his old age and states away from the Pennsylvania of his roots, he welcomes the descendants of a fellow miner killed in the tragedy that would define Ondro’s life. This folding accordion of time—at once both cyclical and linear—provides the scaffold for the layers of presence and past through which we come to know Ondro. When we first meet him, he is an elderly man leading a solitary life in New Hampshire, reflecting on the final agonizing moments spent in a collapsed mine near Scranton and excavating the relics of a life lived in the cool, dark shadow cast by the pall of place and memory.
Andrew Krivak’s latest novel, Mule Boy, invites readers on a descent into the soul as they descend with the narrator, Ondro Prach, the 13-year-old son of Slovak immigrants living and enduring in northeast Pennsylvania, into the mines, where he tends the mule that hauls the coal carts. This brutal toil defines both the industry and the culture. The community is bound up with the mine—its dangers and its detritus—and so too, is Ondro’s life: He lost his own father to the mine.
Ondro has already felt the freight of poverty, grief and isolation when the room where he is working collapses on New Year’s Day in 1929. The four men with whom he mined are killed, and Ondro emerges into a life defined by the disaster.
That he comes by the work of a mule boy at all is a testament to circumstances both harsh and providential. His widowed mother finds favor with the foreman in the wake of Ondro’s father’s death, and he is thus offered work in the mines, ascending to the role of mule boy only after an especially recalcitrant mule injures his previous child handler. Themes of darkness and violence emerge in people and place as Ondro recalls his humble work: men missing limbs, missed daylight, the most subtle of movements marking one for life or death. As narrator he reflects:
I was certain that every man who ever made the descent with cables and coal cars and mules wondered in his heart, regardless of where he stood with God when he saw the priest in the confessional, if this was Hell into which he was descending, the wind, the whispering, the darkness, the blinking fires, the endless, endless, endless falling….
The labor is long and means are limited for these migrant Slovak families just outside of Scranton, and therefore so is any imagination of abundance or profligate joy. Family is paramount, work is prized, and conditions, though bleak, are met with resolve.
Mule Boy explores depths and recesses Krivak has invited readers to probe before. His previous novels, including the National Book Award finalist The Sojourn, surface themes of place, memory, embodiment and industry. Krivak’s Pennsylvania is an “insular, uncreative, oppressive place,” as he said in an interview with Image; such desolation echoes in Mule Boy, as in the description of the town of Hazleton as “nothing more than a ruin in the midst of slag heaps.”
His reverence for the body also emerges anew, likening the work of mining to a ballet Ondro recalls seeing with his wife during happier times, describing an artful, delicate, muscular choreography:
…every movement rehearsed and exact, no motion wasted, no movement made for anything except the extraction of coal that gleamed in the sharp lights of the carbide lamps like diamonds the earth had decided long ago they would never be….
Krivak’s Slovak Catholicism emerges here, too, haunting Ondro in artifacts like his father’s rosary, which he parts with only in prison; in his unconscious recall of memorized prayers; in his offhand references to sacraments. And perhaps a keen reader might detect a sacramental imagination: a rigorous, resilient searching for hope, dignity and humanity when the transcendent seems distant, when banal, meaningless suffering eclipses all other ephemera of a meaningful life.
Krivak’s own story includes time in the Jesuits as a younger man, and his Ignatian accent echoes in his own self-awareness and his attentiveness to the holy and human throughout Ondro’s self-reflection; readers are thus themselves invited to listen closely for such resonance.
We learn the story of Ondro’s life over the course of two successive visits from descendants of those who died in the mine that New Year’s Day. Like their fathers and grandfathers before them, they plumb Ondro’s memory for something of value, something they can haul home, some nugget they can barter for self-understanding.
Ondro emerges from the mine into a community resentful over his survival, disinterested in the weight of his experience. Taunted in the schoolyard about his agonizing days spent within the earth as the men around him succumbed to their crushing injuries and the slow spread of septic shock, Ondro vows to never enact violence upon another, to not participate in advancing the horror of death he experienced when he was too young to understand it. He marries Magda Chibala, daughter of his final companion in the mines, John, after abandoning a halfhearted attempt at university studies, where his trauma is soothed by equal parts of Shakespeare and booze.
Drunk, complacent and downtrodden in the slow, swirling sadness of infertility, he surrenders ultimately to his ennui when he is sent to prison for refusing inscription in World War II. His wife abandons his most cherished belongings in a pawn shop and seeks an annulment, and Ondro finds himself once again enclosed by his circumstances and on the brink of despair.
Trapped but not alone, Ondro finds relief in sharing and storytelling. His cellmate, Jacobson, transcribes the Book of Jonah by hand for Ondro, teaching him Hebrew, and ultimately secures Ondro’s release from prison as a conscientious objector. Ondro returns again and again to the manuscript after his incarceration, finding himself in the image of a prophet plunged into depths and darkness both material and metaphysical. Upon his release, Ondro is conscripted to work for the U.S. Forest Service at the base of Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire, leaving behind both prison and Pennsylvania, scraping together a solitary life at the base of a mountain unmined, noting the calls of loons and the turning of seasons as the years unfurl.
His poetic musings on his memories and their meaning merge with the present when a figure arrives from long ago, absolving but not resolving the untended troubles of the past. A life once marked by a hopeless wandering simply carries on (“I saw in you a glimpse of why God brought me out”) like a deliverance without denouement.
The resilient endurance of relationship and hope that takes root in the background of Ondro’s story does not ameliorate what is harsh. No abrasive memory softens; no frigid reality thaws. Rather than a duality, there is space for both mercy and unforgiving truth to coexist; there is reconciliation.
Krivak’s fifth novel evinces his agile lyricism and depth, his capacity for mapping the terrain of the enduring human spirit with a gentle hand. His poetic prose accompanies readers in bearing witness to Ondro’s story, itself an invitation to readers to mine the stories they have inherited, lived into, struggled to change, labored to not let fold over onto themselves. This elegy offers a rhythmic reading sensation of perhaps accompanying Ondro himself around the pond, into his home and into the recesses of his heart as he traces, in a stream-of-consciousness lyric, the contours of his soul.
So let us go with Krivak into the far depths, the caves of souls; let us explore our deepest chambers, let us journey to the farthest reaches of our memories—to the precipice of our imagination, to the borders of our wounds, to the edges of our most deeply embedded stories, and find the glimmers of grace there.
Mule Boy is gorgeous, haunting and worth journeying with. As Ondro says to his mule: Pom het. “Let’s go.”
This article appears in May 2026.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts