|
Loading... American Rustby Philipp Meyer
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Meyer has fused a molten story set among the defunct steel mills and deer-filled woods of a small Pennsylvania town. The Iraq war is in full swing and unemployment is high: "half the people went on welfare and the other half went back to hunting and gathering". Isaac and Poe are two misfits whose lives are crawling though treacle. Scrawny Isaac, the local genius, has looked after his housebound father since his mother's suicide; Poe, a lumbering giant who at school excelled at baseball, has rejected all college scholarship offers. Brooding over a past relationship with Isaac's sister, he shares a trailer with mother Grace, herself semi-involved with the chief of police. Isaac and Poe's collusion in the murder of a drifter lights the touchpaper for inevitable tragedy. Ultimately a little disappointing but still gripping. ( )A gritty realistic read. I enjoyed each character moving the story along. Great character portrayals and explains the cover. Clever interpretation by the illustrator. A thought provoking read. I can see this becoming a movie. I enjoyed reading this book...mostly. That's quite a compliment from someone who never reads the 'crime' genre. I am also self-obsessed enough that I don't usually read any book where I can't imagine that I could realistically be one of the characters. I suppose that's partly why this book is good: that the characters do seem like ordinary people who happen to have fallen into extra-ordinary situations. Thus I could feel that I could easily have (and still could) ended up as one of these characters, though some quirk of fate. "There, but for the grace of god, go I", is a feeling a had a lot as I read this novel. Where I failed to relate to the story was in the fact that most of the main characters turned out to be highly virtuous in their own way. They stuck by their principles despite the personal pain and suffering. That's not me and it's not my experience of most other people. Even the only clear wrong doer, the Police Chief, did wrong for what might been considered the 'right' reasons. Because this book was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers Giveaway, there's lots of reviews by Americans. They'll have a lot to say about the representation of the decaying American industrial landscape and society. That's one crucial aspect of the book and I've said nothing about it...I suggest you go on and read a proper review. If you never read another book you need to read this one. Best book I've read in a long time. I had to put it down once in a while just to catch my breath! Isaac English and Billy Poe are sons of Buell, an increasingly destitute mill town in the Monongahela Valley of western Pennsylvania. As disparate as brain and jock can be, they are, amazingly, best friends. Isaac wants out of the dying steel belt so badly that he steals his father’s $4000 emergency fund. Poe, in love with the beauty of the rolling hills and river bottoms reverting from manufacturing powerhouse to wilderness, is trying to scrape out a living so he can stay. On what begins as a last walk to the rail yard, the young men encounter a group of bums. Before the day is over, one of the homeless men in dead. The rest of the novel explores the consequences of an act of violence born out of friendship. Much in Meyer’s debut novel, as in life, defies appearances and expectations. Chapters, written in the distinctive voices of the characters -- the boys, Poe’s mother Grace, Isaac’s sister Lee, and the town police chief Bud Harris -- reveal glimpses of their personalities, family histories, and underlying motivations. The story also paints a dreary landscape of the social realities and prospects of post-industrial America. Throughout, it is a compelling, atmospheric journey of the dogged hope, abiding friendship, unspoken love, family loyalty, terrible mistakes, and personal sacrifice which emerge when the American dream goes bust. no reviews | add a review
References to this work on external resources.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Book description |
|
In the late seventies, when I was five, my parents moved us to a blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore. As was the case with most of the old cities of the northeast, Baltimore was in the throes of a serious social collapse. Any industry you could name was falling apart--steel, ship-building, textiles--not to mention the docks and the port. The middle class was evaporating. Even among the neighborhood kids, there was a sense that things were getting worse, not better. That neighborhood was called Hampden, a place since immortalized in many of John Waters’s films. Back then, even in Baltimore’s often shoddy public schools, Hampden was not a place you wanted to admit you were from--my brother and I often lied when asked where we lived. There were police cars and ambulances on our street with some frequency, men passed out on the sidewalk. My father, a graduate student, once went outside with his pistol to check on a man whom he thought had been murdered near our house.
Even so, there was a strong community and the people who were able did their best to watch out for each other. These were good people, working people, but in the end that didn’t matter--their jobs had disappeared and they tumbled from the middle class into the ranks of what we now call the “working poor.” It was an early lesson into the way life worked for certain segments of our society.
Many years later, after a long and roundabout route to get into and eventually graduate from college, I ended up taking a job on Wall Street. I was proud of my new job, proud I’d gone from high school dropout to Cornell University graduate to Wall Street trader. Naturally, complications soon arose.
One surprising thing was that while in most of the country the closing of a factory was seen as tragic, on Wall Street it was nearly a cause for celebration. Whatever the company in question, closing an American factory caused their stock price to go up. The more jobs were outsourced, the more the company executives made on their stock options, the more investment bankers racked up multi-million dollar bonuses. Meanwhile, a short distance away, thousands of families were being devastated.
While I still have many close friends on Wall Street, after a few years there I knew it was the wrong path. I cared about people, I cared about their stories, I’d stopped caring about money. After leaving the bank I spent my time writing and working jobs in construction and as an EMT; I moved back in with my parents and lived in their basement. In 2005, I lucked into a writing scholarship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where I wrote the majority of American Rust.
There are thousands of communities in which this book could have taken place, but Pittsburgh and the Monongahela Valley area, where I have many friends and family, seemed like the most natural setting. After thriving for a hundred years, helping to win our wars and build our great cities, the Mon Valley now offers a striking combination of rural beauty and industrial decay. Once the epitome of the American Dream--full of hard-working towns where you could make a name for yourself--the Valley today has the feel of a forgotten place.
This was the backdrop of the story I wanted to tell in American Rust--how events beyond our control can change the way we define our humanity. I think Americans are a tough people, but often our best doesn’t come out until we’re pushed our hardest. This is what I set out to do in the book. I wanted to examine the old American themes of the individual versus society, freedom versus determinism. I wanted to investigate what really makes us human.
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:45:33 -0500)
The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details.
Quick Links |

American Rust by Philipp Meyer was made available through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Sign up to possibly get pre-publication copies of books.