American+Rust

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OUR DISCUSSION
A small group met at Jo's house. We all liked the book for its gritty realism, and several people had actually grown up in similar "rust belt" settings, so Buell rang true. There is a kind of fatedness about the actions of each of the characters. One criticism is that the book seems to be about the life of Isaac, but the second third shifts to Billy, and we never seem to find out much more except the perfunctory about Isaac. Is this a serious criticism? Maybe makes it less Pulitzer-worthy, but it's still a good read.

**Philipp Meyer on //American Rust//**
(from Jack Thompson) **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.

REVIEWS
This site always has reviews from a number of newspapers or magazines. The current one, below, includes two reviews from the NYT. Cheers, jak http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/american_rust /

Review sent in by Janet:

The New Yorker's March 20, 2009, review of American Rust: "Set in a moribund Pennsylvania steel town, this bleak but skillful debut novel is both affecting and timely. Issac English was a child of promise whose dreams of a bright future beyond his troubled environs were thwarted early on by economic circumstance. His mother dead, his father disabled, a college education no more than a fantasy, he resolves to flee town but is implicated in a violent act that abruptly changes the lives of everyone around him. Meyer occasionally stumbles, especially when he is dealing with the realities of criminal law, but his rigorously sculpted psychologies and assured sense of place are compelling."

You can read Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of American Rust here.

Steel Town Roots, Huck Finn Dreams
by Michiko Kakutani is February 27, 2009.

AMERICAN RUST By Philipp Meyer 367 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $24.95.

Philipp Meyer’s affecting first novel, “American Rust,” takes place in a small Pennsylvania steel town named Buell, a place where the jobs have disappeared, and foreclosures and meth use are on the rise, a town that makes longtime residents feel trapped and young people eager to flee, the sort of town profiled in newspaper and magazine articles about the fallout of the economic downturn on middle America and the tarnishing of the American Dream.

 Mr. Meyer, whose writing has been published in McSweeney’s and The Iowa Review, conjures up this blue-collar Rust Belt town with the same sort of social detail and emotional verisimilitude that Richard Russo has brought to his depictions of upstate New York and [|Russell Banks] has brought to downstate New Hampshire. He writes about his characters’ lives in Buell with sympathy and unsentimental clarity, conveying both the suffocating and supportive aspects of small-town life and his people’s disheartening sense that they have somehow wound up on the wrong side of history, sidelined in a forgotten industrial town in the shiny new information age of globalization. The two young men at the center of “American Rust” — best friends from high school — make a decidedly odd couple: Isaac English, diminutive, brainy and socially awkward, the kid who was supposed to go off to an [|Ivy League] university and become a famous scientist; and Billy Poe, the brawny football star with the volatile temper, a headstrong jock who ignored everyone’s advice to go away to college on an athletic scholarship and instead chose to stay in Buell.

Having spent years at home, taking care of his invalid father instead of following his sister, Lee, to college, Isaac one day impulsively decides to chuck it all and head out to California to begin a new life: he will hitch a ride on a train or bus, and like Huck Finn or [|Jack Kerouac], light out for new territory. This decision immediately sets off a series of snowballing events that will overtake him and Billy, and their families too, as one bad choice after another, one ill-timed development after another, turns into an unstoppable machine obliterating options and hopes.

When a chance encounter that Isaac and Billy have with three homeless men unexpectedly turns ugly, the two former schoolmates find themselves caught in a dangerous spiral of violence. Suddenly Isaac is on the run, not in pursuit of his dream of a new life but in flight from the authorities, and Billy is under arrest for murder and sent away to prison, where his quick temper threatens to land him in even more trouble before he goes to trial.

Although these events sound melodramatic in summary, although the narrative tumble of dominoes requires that the reader occasionally suspend logic (like why aren’t the wounds Billy sustained in the standoff with the homeless men evidence of self-defense?), Mr. Meyer does such a persuasive job of grounding plot developments in his protagonists’ emotional histories that his story acquires the sort of propulsive sense of inevitability that made Dennis Lehane’s novel “Mystic River” such natural material for a film adaptation.

By cutting from one character’s point of view to another, Mr. Meyer is not only able to create a richly layered narrative with multiple perspectives, but he’s also able to climb inside his people’s heads and channel their thoughts and feelings. His portraits of Isaac and Billy demonstrate a keen, Salingeresque empathy for alienated but well-meaning young men bound to one another by loyalty and a shared past, while his descriptions of Isaac’s sister, Lee, and Billy’s mother, Grace, give us two women who make very different choices about the trajectories of their lives.

Lee, a brilliant student like Isaac, got a scholarship to Yale, married a wealthy classmate from Connecticut and is making plans to attend law school. Though she feels bad about having left Isaac to stay home with their invalid father, she rationalizes such feelings of guilt by vowing to come back and fix their lives: she will get her father proper nursing care and help Isaac get into college.

As for Grace, she too once dreamed of escape. She dreamed of going to college, getting a degree and becoming a social worker, but her rocky marriage to Billy’s ne’er-do-well father has kept her from leaving, and she fears that her decision to stay has not only crushed her own dreams but dragged down Billy as well.

Appealing as these characters are, the real moral center of “American Rust” is the local police chief, Harris, a kind, decent man, who realizes that Buell’s “Mayberry days” are over but still tries to bring a neighborly sense of compassion to his job, cutting people a break here and there, trying to see the best in them rather than the worst. Harris, who has been dating Grace on and off for years, once kept Billy out of jail on an assault case and now finds himself torn between his desire to help his longtime lover’s son and his suspicion that Billy is indeed guilty, that the boy is a magnet for trouble.

There are awkward moments in this novel — like Isaac’s pretentious penchant for thinking about himself in the third person — but these are fleeting lapses, steamrollered by Mr. Meyer’s instinctive storytelling powers and his ability to create characters who evolve from familiar types into flesh-and-blood human beings. “American Rust” announces the arrival of a gifted new writer — a writer who understands how place and personality and circumstance can converge to create the perfect storm of tragedy.

(A version of this article appeared in print on February 27, 2009, on page C23 of the New York edition.)

//From the author's Website://
American Rust just named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the //Washington Post// American Rust just named a "Book of the Year" by //The Economist// American Rust named a //New York Times// Notable Book of 2009 American Rust named a Kansas City Star Top 100 Book of 2009 American Rust named an Amazon Top 100 Book of 2009

A movie version of American Rust is currently in the works with Scott Stuber and Pamela Abdy (Garden State) producing and Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) attached as director. American Rust named one of //Newsweek's// "Best. Books. Ever." (July 2009)

American Rust is now being translated into the following eight languages: German, French, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, and Serbo-Croation. Dutch translation released Sept 2009

Reviews and Praise for American Rust
“the social detail and emotional verisimilitude [of] Richard Russo ... a keen, J.D. Salinger-esque empathy. American Rust announces the arrival of a gifted new writer — a writer who understands how place and personality and circumstance can converge to create the perfect storm of tragedy." —Michiko Kakutani, //The New York Times//

"John Steinbeck is alive and well today . . . and his name is Philipp Meyer" —Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic, //The Australian//

“everything about this story seems essentially American…in the tradition that stretches from Ernest Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy. Meyer knows how to create heartbreakingly real female characters, too. [His] tone is less polemic than John Steinbeck's, but he's working on the same broad scale." —//The Washington Post//, Ron Charles

"Meyer is already being compared with John Steinbeck, and with very good reason." —//Esquire UK//

"Do people still think in terms of the Great American Novel – a work of fiction that exactly captures the contemporary spirit of the union? If so, American Rust has GAN stamped all over it. In racing terms it’s by Of Mice and Men, out of Huckleberry Finn, ridden by Cormac McCarthy, and trained by Salinger and Kerouac. " —//The Daily Telegraph// (UK), Roger Perkins