American Rust
Philipp Meyer, 2008
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385527521
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Currently—near Ithaca, New York; Austin, Texas
Philipp Meyer is an American fiction writer, born in 1974, and is the author of the novel American Rust, as well as short stories published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and Esquire UK. He grew up in Hampden, a blue-collar Baltimore, Maryland, neighborhood often featured in the films of John Waters. His mother is an artist; his father is an electrician turned college biology instructor.
Meyer attended Baltimore city public schools, including Baltimore City College High School, until dropping out at age 16 and getting a GED. He spent the next five years working as a bicycle mechanic and occasionally volunteering at Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Center.
At age 20, while taking college classes in Baltimore, Meyer decided to become a writer. He also decided to leave his hometown and at 22, after several attempts at applying to elite colleges, was admitted to Cornell University. Meyer graduated Cornell with a degree in English but then took a job on Wall Street to pay off his student loans.
With the Swiss investment bank UBS, Meyer trained in London and Zurich and was given a position as a derivatives trader. After several years at UBS, he had written most of a novel (no relation to American Rust) and decided to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. When attempts at publishing that novel failed, a book he has called “an apprentice-level work,” Meyer took jobs as an emergency medical technician and construc-tion worker. He was preparing for a long-term career as a paramedic when, in 2005, he received a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where he wrote the majority of American Rust.
Not long after arriving in Austin, Meyer drove to New Orleans to do relief work during Hurricane Katrina. He arrived in the middle of the hurricane and spent several days doing emergency medical work for a local police department.
American Rust was an Economist Book of the Year in 2009, a Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009, a New York Times Notable Book of 2009, a Kansas City Star Top 100 Book of 2009, and an Amazon Top 100 Book of 2009. Reviewers in the London Telegraph, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and Dayton Daily News have suggested it fits the category of "Great American Novel."
The book is a third person, stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman. While a reviewer in The Baltimore Sun compared the novel to the work of Faulkner, various other reviewers, including Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, Ron Charles of the Washington Post, and Taylor Antrim writing in the Daily Beast, have favorably compared Meyer to a wide variety of more traditional writers, including Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and Dennis Lehane.
The Son, published in 2013, has been hailed a classic, even the "Great American Novel," by reviewers. It is a saga of the Texas Mccullough family—"the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development." (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
Meyer currently lives in rural areas outside Ithaca, New York, and Austin, Texas. (Adapted from Wikipedia..)
Book Reviews
Mr. Meyer...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.... 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 - New York Times
Within just a few pages of meeting the central players, we're allowed such intimate access to the rhythm of their thoughts that it becomes easy to fathom—even relate to—their blunders. We hope they will not fail, and this hope makes their failures good reading…American Rust is a bold, absorbing novel with a keen interest in how communities falter. Meyer knows that reductive explanations aren't sufficient, and he moves deftly from the panoramic to the microscopic—from sweeping views of a dying valley to the quiet ruminations of a mind behind bars.
Lewis Robinson - New York Times Book Review
[a] powerful first novel.... Told in language both plaintive and grand…Meyer's tone is less polemic than John Steinbeck's, but he's working on the same broad scale, using the struggles of a few desperate people to portray the tragedy of life in a place that offers no employment, no chance for improvement.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
In his unrelentingly downbeat debut, Meyer offers up a character-driven near-noir set in Buell, a dying Pennsylvania steel town, where aimless friends Billy Poe and Isaac English are trapped by economic and personal circumstance. Just before their halfhearted escape to California, Isaac accidentally kills a transient who tries to rob Poe. The boys return to the crime scene the next day with plans to cover up the crime, setting the plot in motion. Poe is soon under suspicion, and Isaac, distraught after discovering Poe has been carrying on a relationship with Isaac's sister, Lee, sets off for California alone. Meanwhile, Poe's mother, Grace, mourns her own lost opportunities, broods over her son and pines for her on-again-off-again love, the local sheriff. A fully realized tragic heroine, Grace is the poignant thrust of the novel, embodying enough rural tragedy to nearly atone for the novel's weakness: a sense that some of the plot mechanics are arbitrary. Still, Meyer has a thrilling eye for failed dreams and writes uncommonly tense scenes of violence, and in the character of Grace creates a woeful heroine. Fans of Cormac McCarthy or Dennis Lehane will find in Meyer an author worth watching.
Publishers Weekly
The dying steel towns of southwestern Pennsylvania are the somber canvas upon which Meyer paints this tale of class, crime, and circumscribed choices. Lifelong buddies Isaac and Billy find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now Isaac's on the run, Billy's taking the fall for a murder he didn't commit, and their respective families struggle to make sense of what's happened. Meyer's slow, eloquent pacing and lofty vocabulary occasionally seem at odds with the grim realities of Isaac and Billy's adventures, which include prison scenes and tales of life on the road. However, the elegant phrasing provides an ironic contrast between life as it really is and life as the characters wish it could be. Meyer's greatest strength as a novelist lies in his poignantly well-rounded characters, particularly Billy's long-suffering mother, Grace, who repeatedly sacrifices her own prospects for those of her child. A Pandora's box of debate for book clubs, this novel is an essential purchase for libraries in Pennsylvania.
Library Journal
Part earnest Dreiserian tragedy, part Cormac McCarthy novel transplanted to the Steel Belt, Meyer's debut in the end takes a gothic turn into blockbuster-movie bloodbath. Gifted, 20-year-old Isaac has the double bad luck of being born in a dying Pennsylvania steel town and of having an equally smart sister who's already escaped, to Yale and afterward to marriage, leaving him home to tend his disabled father. At the novel's beginning, Isaac has stolen $4,000 from the old man's desk and is lighting out with the quixotic idea that he'll hop a freight and somehow reach the Shangri-La of Berkeley and an astrophysics degree. Isaac is accompanied for the first stretch by his friend Poe, an ex-football star on probation because of a brutal fight that could have earned him serious time except that the sheriff, his mother's lover, intervened. When they seek refuge from the weather in an abandoned factory along the tracks, Isaac and Poe encounter other refugees, transients of longer standing and rougher mien. Hair-triggered Poe incites a fight, and Isaac kills a man with a stone thrown in defense of his friend. This death sets in motion a complex plot that centers on the impossibility of escape, be it from place, circumstance or character. Meyer does a terrific job capturing the tone and ethos of his setting, half postindustrial wasteland and half prelapsarian Eden (OK, four-fifths postindustrial wasteland and one-fifth prelapsarian Eden). Several of the alternating narrators are compellingly drawn, especially the sheriff and Isaac, whose flight is a hellishly compacted journey from innocence to experience. The self-styled "Kid" encounters misery and perfidy everywhere he goes—until he decides to face the music and turns homeward. Despite some contrived plot developments, a grimly powerful hybrid: provocative literary fiction crossed with a propulsive thriller.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In what ways does seeing the novel through the eyes of six different characters change the experience of the book? How would the book be different if seen from only one point of view? Which characters would be more or less likeable if the reader could see them omnisciently? Do you think Meyer was trying to make a broader point by writing this way?
2. Does your opinion of various characters change throughout the book? How and why?
3. Isaac, Poe, Lee, Grace, and Harris are all faced with important decisions that will affect not only their own lives, but also the lives of their loved ones. Whose choice was hardest to make?
4. Which characters behaved in the most unexpected ways?
5. Much of the book touches on the idea of consciously knowing versus knowing subconsciously. In which characters and subplots does this become an important distinction?
6. One of Isaac’s obsessions is the question of what differentiates humans from other animals. What does he ultimately conclude, and why? Do you agree with him?
7. When the book begins, Poe, despite his athleticism, considers himself a coward. Do you agree with his assessment? Has it changed by the time the book ends?
8 . Harris, by most conventional measures, is a “good” man at the book’s beginning. Has he changed by the book’s end? Is he still good? Would society agree with you?
9. Lee says in her own words at the beginning of the novel,that she abandoned her family to save herself. Do you agree with this self-assessment? Does your opinion of her change as the story unfolds? What would you do in her shoes?
10. How much responsibility does Grace have forHarris’s actions near the end of the book? Does she have moral responsibility? Are her actions more or less pure than Harris’s? What would you have done in her or Harris’s position? Is Grace still a good person?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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