Andrew Krivak’s The Bear was one of my favorite reads of last year, an end-of-the-world story that was, strangely, one of the most beautiful and hopeful books I’ve read. I picked up his latest, Mule Boy, just out from Bellevue Press, immediately, without even reading the back.

Most of the book is told by Ondro Prach, an older man looking back on the defining event of his life. As a child (the titular mule boy) he was the sole survivor of a mine collapse in Pennsylvania on January 1, 1929, which killed four other men. In the years since, descendants of those who died come to him, wanting at last to know what happened, what their loved ones endured, what they said, how they died. What we get is Ondro’s recounting of those days he spent in the earth, as well as the trajectory of his life after he came out, including a failed marriage and time in prison.

From the start, I was intrigued by Krivak’s formal choices. While the book is divided into sections, there are no periods at all, so we get long, seemingly incessant sentences. If that sounds like too much work, like it might be confusing or overly strange, let me assure you it reads smoothly, and the effect fits this odd, Faulknerian tale.

Here is a sample of the prose, from the start of the second section:

And I wake here to the sound of territorial robins from the open window before the sun even breaks the horizon to the east of the pond and the whisper of breeze out of the cool night into a warming day approaching autumn, no blasts or buzzers or humming breakers, though creation has not ceased to groan, and 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 and breakfast with the coals that have burned down overnight, even though it is late August, raise them back to life with some birch-bark kindling and wood I cut and split last fall and will have to do again this fall before winter . . .

It’s rambling and, to me, lovely. Much like some of Faulkner’s narrators, this is a voice in which the past does not recede but presses continuously into the present. Ondro is not simply recounting what happened while in the earth; he is still living within it.

That sense of a past that refuses to settle becomes the novel’s deeper concern. As Ondro tells his story, Mule Boy begins to open into something more than a survival narrative. During one stretch of his life, he encounters both the story of Book of Jonah and the writings of Maimonides, lenses through which the book can be read. Jonah offers a familiar pattern — a descent into darkness and a return — while Maimonides raises harder questions about suffering, knowledge, and what we can reasonably expect to understand about our lives.

What makes Krivak’s novel compelling is that it seems to work with both at once. Ondro’s experience invites us to look for meaning, to shape what happened into something like a story with purpose, and yet the telling resists that impulse. The longer he speaks, the more the past feels not resolved but ongoing, something he continues to live within rather than something he has overcome. Yet somehow Krivak makes this exploration meaningful and, again in its own strange way, hopeful.