Book Review: American Rust (2009) by Philipp Meyer

This is Meyer's debut novel, and I'm so glad I read his second, The Son (my review), before this one. The Son is big, bold, self-assured and its few flaws are the result of too much ambition. American Rust reads like a novel created by a committee tasked with putting out a literary version of a multi-part New York Times piece on life in the Rust Belt. That Meyer is a good writer isn't in doubt; he writes sharp dialogue, his characters (the male ones, anyway) are rugged, edgy and painfully real, and his descriptions of landscapes, urban and natural, are superb. The problem here is that his novel doesn't have the ambition to be more than just a literary litany of what ails Pennsylvania's coal and steel towns.

The two central characters are Isaac and Billy, best friends, both barely out of their teens, and both unsure what to do with their lives. They live in Buell, PA, and like every other town in the region it's been economically devastated by the death of the US steel industry. Those who aren't unemployed are working for minimum wage or are living a semi-criminal life. Isaac steals some money from his crippled father and decides to hit the road to California by hopping freight trains. Billy, an ex-high school football star, opts to accompany him for no better reason than it seems like a good idea at the time. They are an unlikely pair; Isaac is a weedy brainiac and Billy is a jock with a penchant for violence. They've barely started on their journey when they have an altercation with three homeless men that ends with Isaac accidentally killing one of them by way of defending Billy. A few days later Billy is arrested and charged with the murder, which he doesn't deny in an act of self-sacrifice to give some meaning to his selfish and wasted life. Isaac, meanwhile, goes on the run. Isaac's and Billy's fractured families are drawn into the story, but it's at this point that the story runs aground. The novel is told from the POV of a half dozen or so characters, but what's missing is a compelling narrative. Once Billy's arrested the story drags its feet as we hear from the different characters and their stories of despair and struggle in the heart of the Rust Belt. The only tension or narrative momentum is provided by Billy's stint in jail as he awaits trial and faces the wrath of prison gangs. The writing in this section is excellent, but it could just as well have been dropped in from a standard crime fiction novel.

American Rust is brimming with sympathy for its beaten-down characters and the region that's become an industrial dust bowl. What's missing from this story, what makes the novel so frustrating, is that Meyer shies away from bringing politics into the story. The plight of people in the Rust Belt is entirely the result of a series of ruinous political and economic decisions made by politicians and corporate executives stretching back decades. Meyer barely hints at the factors that impoverished this region. It's akin to writing a novel set in Vichy France and not mentioning the war or the Nazis. The virtually apolitical outlook of the novel isn't unusual in American literature. European writers, especially in the crime fiction field, enthusiastically bring politics and big business into their stories. American writers can't seem to get past their nation's religious belief that the individual and the individualism is everything. They don't seem happy with the idea that a character can be a hopeless victim or puppet of forces beyond his control. Or perhaps they feel that the nuts and bolts of politics and high finance don't have a place in literature. Nineteenth century writers such as Zola, Balzac, and Trollope happily took on these subjects, but the only American of that ilk that comes to mind is Gore Vidal.

Meyer's novel ticks all the boxes when it comes to mentioning issues like drug abuse, unemployment, underemployment, municipal underfunding, poor healthcare, and so on, but without giving these issues any historical or sociological context, Meyer is doing a disservice to the very people he so clearly sympathizes with. The people in the Rust Belt know they've been victimized by politicians and big business, but in American Rust this catastrophe is almost presented as a natural disaster, something that happened for no rhyme or reason.

The committee feel to the novel comes from the inclusion of far too many stock characters and tropes from modern literary fiction. There's the suicide of a mother that damages the children; the Ivy League woman who can't resist the manly charms of Billy the jock; the embittered father, broken in body and mind; and the young, tortured genius who's just too sensitive for this world. And does anyone actually ride the rails these days? Last of all, it has to be said that Meyer is poaching on literary territory created and mastered by K.C. Constantine (my piece on hiin is here), who wrote a series of crime novels set in Pennsylvania's coal and steel country. Constantine, however, was not afraid to bring politics into the mix.

Book Review: My Home Is Far Away (1944) by Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell is one of those authors who has received more fame, critical recognition, and sales in death than she ever did in life. Gore Vidal championed her work, and in the last fifteen or so years her novels have come back into print. Powell was born in 1896 in Ohio, and the subject matter of her novels is divided between studies of small town life in Ohio and witty glimpses into the lives of New York's bourgeois bohemians. I read one of her New York novels a few years ago and I can't say that it made much of an impression on me. It was well written, smart, but felt slightly insubstantial.

My Home Is Far Away is Powell's lightly fictionalized autobiography of her childhood in Ohio, and it's one of the best novels of its type I've ever come across. What suprised me the most about it was that it only sold four thousand copies on its initial release, which seems paltry for a novel that should be nipping at the heels of To Kill a Mockingbird for the title of best American coming-of-age novel, Female Division. But then I considered the year it came out and things began to make sense. America was at its patriotic apogee in 1944 and I doubt the reading public would have had much enthusiasm for a novel that put the boots to the Andy Hardy version of small town life that was currently popular.

The character who does the coming of age is Marcia Willard, the precocious five-year-old daughter of a traveling salesman, Harry, and his wife Daisy. Marcia has two sisters, Florrie, the youngest, and Lena, the eldest. The time is the early 1900s and the place is London Junction, Ohio. Harry is the archetypal traveling salesman who dresses sharp, loves to tell a joke, and has a high opinion of himself. The truth is that Harry neglects his loving family and spends money he doesn't have mostly on himself. Daisy and the children scrape by on his occasional largesse, store credit, selling their home baking, and the aid of relatives. Daisy dies suddenly and Harry remarries after farming out the children to relatives. Idah, his second wife, is a honours graduate of Cruel Stepmother College. Between her cruelty and Harry's indifference to the suffering of his children, the family eventually falls apart. The two eldest girls are now teenagers, and Lena moves out to live with an aunt. The novel ends with Marcia running away from home to Cleveland where she hopes to find a new life with some people who are no more than acquaintances.

My basic description of the novel makes it sound like a generic, melodramatic sob story. It isn't. Marcia and her sisters do suffer from abuse and neglect, but an equal amount of time is spent describing Marcia's joy in discovering all the colour and variety in the world around her. She and her sisters are, by and large, raised without a lot of supervision, and that opens up all kinds of worlds and adventures for the trio. They spend, for example, a delightful summer living on a relative's farm, and an extended stay living in a railroad hotel provides a learning experience of a very different kind. Powell crafts her characters with subtlety and feeling, and even the egregious Idah (Powell left her actual stepmother's name unchanged for the novel) seems less of a caricature thanks to the social environment we see her living in.

About that social environment; Powell's depiction of lower-middle-class life in the Midwest is revelatory and detailed. This is a society filled with casual and transient relationships between men and women. Many people marry, but there's often little love involved, but a great many financial considerations. Children are casually ignored, abused or cast-off depending on the financial health of the parents. And everyone is scrambling, with sharp elbows at the ready, to get ahead/advantage of the next guy, As a portrait of seedy, grasping, cynical, street-level capitalism this novel has few equals. This wasn't the sort of book that was going to be embraced in 1944, but now, seventy years later, Harry and Marcia Willard need to take their place beside Atticus and Scout.

Post-Election Ramblings

Gore Vidal famously said that there's one political party in the US and it's called the Property Owning Party. The Democrats represent the right wing of the party, and the Republicans represent the reactionary wing. Gore continues to be accurate in his analysis. Here are some other random thoughts on what went down last night:

Let the Racist Backlash Commence

TV talking heads on all the networks couldn't stop talking about the Latino vote and the GOP's inability to capture it. Watch for the more rabid, bug-eyed Republicans to start screeching about American politics being hijacked by Hispanics and blacks, who, you know, aren't really Americans.

The Republicans Score a False Positive

Rightist commentators will probably try and take comfort in the fact that the popular vote was almost a draw. That's a false positive. Obama won despite the Republicans having an unofficial propaganda wing consisting of FOX News and almost all of talk radio. Those media outlets have been flaying Obama and the Democrats for four years. There is no countervailing liberal media to negate this advantage for the GOP. If the GOP's private sector propaganda apparatus didn't exist it's likely Obama would have enjoyed a wider margin of victory.

Don't Talk About War

The taboo subject for all concerned in this election was military spending. Both candidates, not surprisingly, voiced support for "our brave men and women in the armed forces", and Romney of course wants to make the military even stronger. Nobody wanted to talk about the fact that the trillions spent on the military is the dirty secret behind America's fiscal defecit; that, and certain people hiding their money in the Cayman Islands.

Watch the Republicans Split In Two

The Tea Party section of the GOP is likely to get even more bitter and angry and eliminationist. They might feel so alienated from more moderate Republicans that they'll form a breakaway party. In same the way that the Green Party under Ralph Nader became a home (temporarily) for Democrats who felt their party was drifting right, the Tea Party people might strike out on their own. It's not hard to imagine a narcissistic publicity hound like Sarah Palin happily heading such a party.

No More Birthers!

This issue is now officially dead. If Donald Trump brings it up again he should be hauled in front of a state psychiatric board and declared incompetent.

Any Other Democracy is Better Than American Democracy

For those observing this election from next door, it once again offered proof that the American electoral process is part museum piece, part corporate exercise. Electoral College? A low population state like Maine gets the same number of senators as California? $6bn in campaign costs? Corporations can run ads against candidates?  This isn't a democracy, it's democracy-lite.