American Rust Book

When I worked in France I covered a lot of industrial disputes, as you can imagine. Renault would try and close a factory, and suddenly the whole country was out on strike: I found it incredible when I first arrived. 'Surely,' I said to colleagues, 'someone running a company has the right to decide whether or not to keep one of their factories open.' They looked at me like I was insane. They didn't see the issue in those terms at all: for them, it was about a world with a colossal wealth gap where businessmen who make millions a day can put hundreds of people out of work just to increase their margins.

For American colleagues (who on top of all that were also getting their heads around European healthcare), it was sometimes quite a paradigm shift. And whatever happened to unionism in the States, anyway? I guess the decline in manufacturing put an end to a lot of it, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that there's something on the level of the national psyche going on, too. The steel-working towns in southwestern Pennsylvania that form the subject and the setting for American Rust are a case in point: thousands of people laid off in a very short space of time, an entire region sent into acute decline - the kind of mass shutdown that you'd expect would generate a near-revolution, at least within local communities.

But there had never been any revolution, not anything close, a hundred and fifty thousand people lost their jobs but they had all gone quietly. It was obvious there were people responsible, there were living breathing men who'd made those decisions to put the entire Valley out of work, they had vacation homes in Aspen, they sent their kids to Yale, their portfolios went up when the mills shut down. […] There was something particularly American about it'blaming yourself for bad luck'that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream. In France, she thought, they would have shut down the country.

They would, too. The landscape of American industrial decline is described with awesome power in this book, and its effects on people's choices and decisions are explored relentlessly and without sentimentality. It must have seemed especially timely when it was released in 2009; even now, it feels like an important way of putting some flesh on the bones of all the newspaper stories about economic uncertainty. Most impressive - particularly for a first novel - is that the characters are not dropped into this environment cold, but rather seem to have grown out of it organically: the school football star now vegetating in a doublewide, the smart kid forced to stay because his father was injured in an industrial accident, the girl who escaped guiltily to Yale in an attempt to avoid the fate of all her small-town friends:

'Do a boy once in school, know it's a mistake but five years later there's no one else and the bar is closing so you do it again. Ten years later you're married to him.'

In Trish's fine review, she mentions that this is the sort of book that should get more men reading novels, and I can see something in that - it does feel like quite a male book. Not the laddishness of a Nick Hornby, or the horny-intellectual stance of a Philip Roth, but rather a kind of blue-collar gruffness, conveyed through an admirably curt and colloquial prose style. Some critics have complained about this prose, rather prissily I feel, objecting to the many comma splices and other run-ons - and occasionally, it must be said, the effect becomes a little staccato and intrusive:

Poe was asleep, the warm air blowing on them, the faint light from the dashboard, she ran her hands across his legs, her fingers through the hair between them, then she touched the car window, the cold glass, outside it was very cold.

But on the whole I thought it worked extremely well. Meyer is able to compress a huge amount of information and personality into some very brief internal dialogues, like a kind of stream-of-consciousness Cormac McCarthy - straight away when I began the book I found myself admiring this little sketch in the opening paragraph:

Late morning and he walked quickly through the woods toward town'a small thin figure with a backpack, trying hard to keep out of sight. He'd taken four thousand dollars from the old man's desk; Stolen, he corrected himself. The nuthouse prison-break. Anyone sees you and it's Silas get the dogs.

That's just lovely. In general this is a book that feels well-edited, well-refined - although I still suspect it would be better if it were a little shorter. And it's certainly not problem-free. I found the characters' motivations hard to believe a lot of the time, and the opening dramatic confrontation, on which the remainder of the novel rests, never quite rang true to me. But the book still works, because the characters and the environment feel absolutely real, even in their more technical passages. (The descriptions of prison are the most gritty and naturalistic I can remember reading.)

Although you can feel the whole thing building to a nasty climax, the tragedy is not rooted in narrative melodrama but in economic reality.

'…it wasn't just that we lost all those jobs, it was that people didn't have anything to be good at anymore. […] There's only so good you can be about pushing a mop or emptying a bedpan. We're trending backwards as a nation, probably for the first time in history, and it's not the kids with the green hair and the bones through their noses. […] The real problem is that the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at. You lose that, you lose the country.'

The French are getting their placards ready - they know exactly what's coming. And to those prominent voices in the US who still believe that success depends only on working hard and saying your prayers, this novel is likely to do more to illustrate the counterargument than a hundred news reports ever will.