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American Rust: A Novel
by Philipp Meyer
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Hardcover
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Format: Deckle Edge
ISBN13: 9780385527514
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.
Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.
Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.
Amazon Best of the Month, February 2009: Buell, Pennsylvania lies in ruins, a dying--if not already dead--steel town, where even the lush surrounding country seethes with concealed industrial toxins. When Isaac English and Billy Poe--a pair of high-school friends straight out of Steinbeck--embark on a starry-eyed cross-country escape to California, a violent encounter with a trio of transients leaves one dead, prying the lid off a rusted can of failed hope and small-town secrets. American Rust is Philipp Meyer's first novel, and his taut, direct prose strikes the perfect tone for this kaleidoscope of fractured dreams, elevating a book that otherwise might be relentlessly dour to the level of honest and unflinching storytelling. (Interestingly, Meyer has a fan in Patricia Cornwell, who name-checked American Rust in her latest novel, Scarpetta, even though Meyer's book hadn't been released yet.) --Jon Foro
Amazon Exclusive: Philipp Meyer on American Rust
 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.
| Customer Reviews: |
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| Expected more from the hype |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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As a Pittsburgh native who watched the collapse of the steel industry, I thought I'd find more in this book to relate to. The characters were well-drawn and sympathetic, but the plot seemed more melodramatic than necessary. The ending also left a lot to be desired; full resolution was obviously not possible, but a bit more information on what happened after the denouement would've been welcome (and no, it's not the sort of book that lends itself to a sequel). I can't say I'm sorry I read it, but on the other hand I have other books in my to-read stack that I wish I'd gotten to first.
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| Trouble, Troubles, and More Troubles. |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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The novel is well written and easy to read. However the story line starts at point "A" and returns. The story focus is on a few key people and how they each handle their lot in life when a difficult situation arises. Although the story was interesting to a point, there was little action or intrigue in the writing.
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| Implausibilities, impossibilities, and unanswered questions |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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I read American Rust on the positive recommendation it received in The Economist. While the book is not badly written, it did not live up to its billing. The author deftly sketches the topography, geography, and buildings in which its characters grew up, and are now imprisoned. Unfortunately he could not leave well enough alone and gives us one of these detailed descriptions seemingly in every chapter. After the fourth or fifth description of yet another decaying building, it becomes gratuitous and cloying. Yet it continues throughout the book. How many descriptions of dilapidated buildings and hillsides do we need? We get the point by about page 20, yet it recurs until the end.
My greater criticism with the book is its glaring factual inaccuracies regarding points central to the story.
1. Why is Isaac English so confident that he can remain free and uncharged for the murder as long as Billy Poe keeps quiet and "takes the hit?" And why is Billy so certain he's going to do life in prison for this murder? After all Isaac knows there was clearly one living eyewitness to the murder (the man holding the knife to Billy's throat) who can testify with absolute certainty that Billy didn't commit the crime, and that Isaac did. Given that this witness has no reason whatsoever to falsely accuse Billy (the victim was his friend), thus allowing the true killer going unpunished, why does Isaac not fear this witness's revelation? After all, the authorities have made clear they have located this witness. And why does Billy never even consider that this witness will exonerate him in spite of his insistence on doing Isaac's sentence? Billy and Isaac both know that this witness knows with unassailable certainty who the true killer is (not to mention the second possible eyewitness in the room during the murder--whatever happened to him? we are never told), yet this thought implausibly never crosses their minds (or anybody else's, for that matter). I kept waiting for the author to explain this inconvenient fact, but it was never touched upon. Because the story rests upon this ploy by Isaac and Billy, it goes beyond belief. Exactly what evidence does Billy so fear will convict him? His jacket at the scene? This is supposed to overcome the testimony of one, possibly two, eyewitnesses that Billy didn't do it, but that Isaac, who inconveniently and immediately became a fugitive, did? Billy's fear and Issac's confidence are thoroughly unjustified, and thus is the plot.
2. Why does Isaac never become a suspect? He has fled the day after the murder for no other apparent reason, and eyewitnesses with no reason to falsely accuse him have been located. Implausible.
3. Why is Billy held in prison (and it appears to be a maximum security one at that!), when he hasn't even been tried? This is impossible.
The author tells an interesting tale, but I kept waiting for him to explain away the growing implausibilities and impossibilities. He never came close, thus a disappointing book.
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| Finally! A New Novel I Can Love |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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As my four regular readers can attest, I do not have much good to say about the contemporary novelists held in high regard by literary critics and prize juries. As a rule, I don't trust the taste of book critics. Too many have joined the Cult of the Sentence, deeming that fiction best that piles up the most standout sentences, imagery and "lyrical" language, the accumulated weight of which apparently makes a novel literature with a capital L. It's been a long time since I picked up a book from the New Fiction shelf at the bookstore, read the first page and walked to the register with it. The triumph of style over story in modern literary fiction leaves me cold, bitter and buying classics.
Then I read a couple of reviews of American Rust. (Yes, I still do read reviews, even the New York Times Book Review, hoping against all evidence for change, going back again and again like an abused spouse.) The only thing in the reviews that got me looking for the novel was the subject matter: the effect of industrial collapse on America workers. Being from a long line of working class rednecks, I decided to give another new author a chance based on that alone.
And I'm glad I did. Philipp Meyer has produced a book that, by the end, had me comparing his novel to Richard Wright's Native Son and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Like them, he masterfully weaves into the story the socioeconomic and political pressures that bear on the lives of his characters without preaching, without beating us over the head with a morality tale. Yet you can't come away from it without knowing in your bones the corrosive effects of industrial decline on the lives of his working class characters. He has deep sympathy for all of his characters, the "good" and the "bad." Each character has their own trajectory, and Meyer makes it inseparable from what sent them in the direction they take.
While Meyer does have one stylistic quirk I found annoying--he sometimes drops commas and periods that interrupt the natural flow of his sentences--for the most part the writing is straight forward, lacking the self-conscious poetic flourishes so much a part of contemporary literary writing. His prose serves the story rather than call attention to the author.
Buy American Rust. Don't take it out of the library. The author deserves the royalty, and I don't say that about many authors these days. I look forward to more Philipp Meyer.
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| A fascinating story about relationships and loyalty |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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The story centres on two unlikely twenty year old friends, Billy Poe, a hulking one ex-schoolboy football player, and Isaac English, a slight boyish genius who is looking to escape the dwindling small town in which he grew up. But on the day of his planned departure a dramatic event alters not just Isaac's plans, but plunges Billy into a most testing situation.
Along with Billy and Isaac, playing a big part in the story are Grace, Billy's mother, Harris, the police chief who is in a sort of relationship with Grace, and Isaac's father and sister.
It is an involving story, with appealing but by no means perfect characters. But one of the aspects that makes it especially interesting is at the same time in danger of making it verge on the tiresome. The story is told by turn from the viewpoint of the various individuals, and although always in the third person, we see into the mind of each of the characters, and this is done very convincingly, so convincingly that it capture the way one's mind works on a problem or worry, by going over it again and again, looking at it from different angles. While this is very real, for we all probably have done this in our own minds at some time, it can become a little wearisome in print, and one becomes impatient for the story to advance.
But that aside, it is a fascinating story about relationships, not just of the loyalty of the two boys, but of all the characters involved, and what they will do for those who really matter to them.
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