American Rust: A Book about the Destruction of the American Heartland and the people in it.

 

Philipp Meyer is a talented writer. “American Rust” is his first book.  Allegedly.  Because a ‘first book’ doesn’t include all those thousands of words lying in a half-finished manuscript in the drawer. 

I mention this because the writing style is evolved, not in its formulative stages.  The prose (should be another word for it) is intuitive, and reflective of mixed Pennsylvania Dutch sentence structure coupled with a Joycean stream of consciousness model that gets into the reader’s head.  

The novel is well-grounded and generally well researched.  Characters are real, not the idealized   social types popular with people thinking literature and writing should remain within the aegis of academic preferences, aspirations, and fantasies.  

Politics don’t figure much in this novel in any except in incidental ways.  Meyer’s story captures the feelings and sensations of a time not entirely passed.  The destruction of the post WWII industrial base. Same things happening in fictional Buell are still happening or have happened in so many small and even large towns of America.  Heavy and light industry shipped to Asia.

At the center of “American Rust”  are two long-time high school friends, Isaac, an undeveloped would be something tethered to  his crippled father in a small dead town with no future prospects.  Then there’s his bosom buddy Billie Poe, former star athlete, volatile, also talented but fated to fail. Like with everyone else, he has ideas but fails to act on them.

The two young men share a special and unique bond. Billy, or “Poe” as he’s characterized in the text, pulled Isaac out of the icy cold waters of  a river.  Apparently, Isaac inherited the suicide gene. His mother filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself in the river

 Their families are part of it too. 

Grace is Billie Poe’s mother who missed her chance of an upgrade by sacrificing her life to raising Billie, even if her feet are stuck in the physical and emotional mire of Buell.  

There’s a background focus on the decline of  American manufacturing.     This is about people in a small town in western Pennsylvania (referred to as ‘Pennsyltucky’ be people trying to denigrate the place) who are struggling to get by as the times they are a changing.’ Think of Billy Joel’s anthemic song “Allentown:”

‘Well, we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem, they're killing time
Filling out forms, standing in line

That’s the tapestry upon which the plot is built.  This speaks of the decline of the American steel industry  and old-school manufacturing in general. Bethlehem Steel was a giant economic force in Pennsylvania’s   Lehigh Valley.  About 300 miles west, near Pittsburgh, is fictional Buell Pa where things seem even worse.  

 The Lehigh Valley has survived, been rejuvenated to some extent. The giant rusted hulk of the legendary Pennsylvania steel mill has been turned into a museum. Across the road from it is a shiny new gambling casino which employs a large number of people though not nearly as many as the steel industry supported.  

Buell has not survived.  Or it’s on life support, and so are the people who live there, it seems.  Buell is a monument to abandoned factories,  rusting machinery and      double-wide trailers where Isaac’s best friend lives with his arthritic mother.

This books does a lot of things well.  I particularly liked the way the writer created the tense, interlocking reationships between the four principal characters. That much is tight. 

What’s not tight about the novel is that the Isaac character spends too much time engaging in masturbatory philosophical meanderings which do little for the plot.  Some of it does help to define the character;  too much of it gives you heartburn.  Granted, this was not a large impediment to me enjoying the book. 

My hit on the end of the book is ambiguous just as the writer probably intended.  The characters came out bruised, dented, and changed forever but they’re still breathing and marching forward.  I like that — the scrappy determination of small town America.  Maybe ‘cause that’s where I was at during a particular period of my life.

I’d be looking at reading this writer again perhaps. So. . . B-plus or A-minus. C’est la meme chose.