Matt's Reviews > American Rust

Phillip Meyer’s The Son is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s a multi-generational epic about the undulating fortunes of a Texas oil family that beautifully explores the dimensions and consequences of America’s westward expansion. It manages to operate as both a pointed deconstruction of historical mythmaking while also being devastatingly entertaining.

It has taken me awhile, but I have finally circled back to American Rust, Meyer’s debut novel. American Rust takes place in contemporary, post-Great Recession Pennsylvania. Yet, like The Son, it uses a familiar narrative trope – in this case, the timeless “a man goes on a journey” – to critique American exceptionalism. American Rust is a forensically-detailed journey through the detritus of the American Dream.

The two main characters are Isaac English and Billy Poe. Isaac is a brilliant underachiever who is caught in the rural town of Buell, Pennsylvania (a fictional place, modeled after Any Post-Industrial City, USA). His sister, Lee, has gone off to Yale and married a rich husband, leaving Isaac to care for his ailing, widower father, Henry. Living in a financial hell-scape, Isaac determines do follow the route of any good Steinbeckian character: he sets off on foot for California. Before leaving, he gets his friend Billy to tag along for part of the trip. Billy is a former big-man-on-campus, a high school football star and lady’s man who never took the next step. He is held back by his own limited vision, and a history of violence.

Isaac and Billy don’t get far before an event takes place. That’s all I can say. Something happens and the story spins out from there.

Meyer’s tells this story from the third-person limited perspective. He uses alternating viewpoint chapters that capture the perspectives of a half-dozen characters, including Isaac, Billy, and Lee; Billy’s long-suffering mother, Grace; police chief Bud Harris, who is involved with Grace and looks out for Billy; and Henry English, a former factory worker reduced to a wheelchair. Fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire will recognize this storytelling style. (Fans of George R.R. Martin might not recognize how an author is able to start a story, and then finish it).

Each of the chapters are written in a kind of stream-of-conscious style that captures the varied dimensions of each person. It’s a literary conceit, to be sure, but Meyer’s keeps it readable. This isn’t the kind of book where you need to unpack every sentence to figure out what just happened. Meyer’s has a very particular knack for capturing the distinct personalities of each of his creations. You know you’ve captured a fictional person when you – the reader – can both root for a character, dislike a character, and change your mind about a character several times, all in the span of 367 pages.

The plot – of which I will not speak in detail – is engaging and fast moving. It is, in fact, so engaging and fast moving that you probably won’t stop to think too deeply about some nagging plot holes and questionable logic. I was reading so fast at the end that I didn't have time to do anything except turn the page. To be sure, American Rust is not a perfect novel. It is flawed. Overall, however, it achieves all its ends. It is executed with such supreme skill that minor hiccups are easily ignored.

(As a personal note, I read two-thirds of American Rust while attending a seminar so boring that I’d fall asleep if I tried explaining it to you. Everyone I was with thought it was terrible. I thought it was great! Didn't hear a damn word of it. My only complaint was that it didn't last quite long enough for me to finish the book.)

Plot and character aside, the great achievement of American Rust is in its setting. Meyer’s Pennsylvania is an economically-devastated wasteland of dying towns and shuttered factories. All the jobs have gone overseas and the once-thriving middle-class has disappeared. Drugs have replaced wages. Vagrants ride the rails like in Depression-days of yore. The woods and back-roads are populated by the dispersed and desperate. A stranger walking into town gets the cross-eye from law enforcement. Meyer’s is incredibly effective at creating an atmosphere. His capitalist moonscape reminded me of nothing less than Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic vision in The Road.

The Great Recession was a moment of historical impact. Millions of jobs were lost that will never be recovered. The very roadmap of American life was torn up, thrown in a metal can, and lit on fire. It is a big deal. It is a seismic thing.

And yet the world just keeps spinning without any real accounting. The rich stay rich; it’s no one’s fault; and let’s move on. (And just over the horizon? Robots). This is one of the few articles of popular culture that engages the subject head-on.

(One of the most interesting things about the mega-popular thriller Gone Girl is how it tried to tackle the consequences of the Great Recession, with powerful scenes set in an abandoned mall and a deserted subdivision. Yet all anyone cared about was that halftime twist. So much for dealing with our issues).

American Rust isn’t just critiquing our self-conceptions, it is dramatizing a new reality. Something has gone terribly wrong here, and for some reason, only a New York City developer and a self-described socialist from Vermont have tapped into a pulsing vein of resentment that has existed for awhile but been studiously ignored. You don’t have to buy into political demagoguery to acknowledge that a huge swath of people who had been dutifully following “the Way” are getting left behind. Have, in fact, already been left in the rearview.

No one in American Rust is real. Yet it feels like Meyer is speaking for actual people whose voices have gone long unheard. He is the Chorus for a vanishing species: the blue-collar American Middle Class.