American Rust

American Rust, Philipp Meyer’s debut novel, is a hard story to forget. Beyond a doubt, it is one of the bleakest portrayals of small town America written since the Great Depression and its plot, for good reason, is a reminder of the fiction that came out of that era. Present day Buell, Pennsylvania, a steel town that is slowly rusting away because there is not even enough money left to tear down all the deserted steelworks in the area, is a throwback to 1930s America when high unemployment rates pushed so much of the country into despair.

Isaac English and his older sister, Lee, are two of the brightest students ever to come out of Buell High School. Isaac’s problem is that Lee escaped Buell for Yale, a husband, and a new life far from her depressed hometown, leaving him alone to deal with their invalid father. Isaac, though, has finally had enough and, with the $4000 he stole from their father, he plans to ride the rails to California to start his own new life.

Billy Poe, Isaac’s best friend, decides against going to California but does agree to walk with Isaac as far as where he will be able to hop his first train. A sudden thunderstorm that causes them to seek shelter inside an abandoned mill, though, will change their lives forever because of the three homeless men they meet there. That encounter ends with one of the homeless men dead from a crushed skull and Billy Poe charged with killing him. Isaac, unaware of what is happening to Billy back in Buell, continues on his hapless journey toward a new life, suffering more encounters with bullies and thieves along the way, and growing up more in a few days than he had since leaving high school.

American Rust does not require some spectacular plot to keep the reader turning pages. In fact, the all-but-accidental death of the homeless man, the focal point of the entire novel, could have easily been seen as just another case of self-defense. Rather, the real tragedy of their story is that the boys believe they will be charged with murder if tied to the incident in the old mill and that Billy, when he is arrested, refuses to defend himself for fear of implicating Isaac.

The killing and its cover-up especially have an impact on the people who care most about Billy Poe and Isaac English, and Meyer builds American Rust around alternating first-person chapters that give these voices weight equal to the words of Billy and Isaac themselves. We hear from Lee, Isaac’s guilt-ridden sister who finally realizes what her brother has been through since she abandoned him. We suffer with Grace, Billy Poe’s mother, as she grieves for him and comes to terms with the fact that, despite her willingness to do anything to save him from his fate, there is little she can do to help him. We hold our breaths as the town’s police chief, a man romantically involved with Grace, considers throwing his career away, and more, in order to save the woman he loves.

American Rust is about people and what happens to those people when the future they counted on is snatched from them. It is heavy on atmosphere and memorable characters and it is, I am certain, destined to be one of my favorites of 2009.

Rated at: 5.0

Best Books of 2009

This year I have combined my fiction and my nonfiction reading into one list of my 2009 favorites. The only two nonfiction books to make the list, in fact, sandwich my eight favorite novels of the year. After studying similar lists on other book blogs these last few days, I am fascinated that there is so little overlap on any of them, including this one. So many great books...so little time to read them.

Even more fascinating to me is that six of the eight novels listed are debut novels. I doubt that will ever happen to me again.

1. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women – Harriet Reisen
This Louisa May Alcott biography answered all the questions I had about the Alcott family and its relationship with many of the literary stars and great thinkers of its day. The book is written in a very readable style and, because most readers already know so much about Louisa and her family, it almost reads like a novel. From my review of the book: "There is so much here that even the biggest Alcott fan will come away with a new appreciation of what this great writer accomplished in her relatively short lifetime."

2. Spooner – Pete Dexter
Pete Dexter has what some would consider a rather peculiar sense of humor – and I enjoy it so much I could listen to him tell stories all day long. The next best thing to that experience is reading a Pete Dexter novel and Spooner, in which Dexter creates one of his more memorable characters (Warren Spooner), is a real treat for Pete Dexter fans. From my review of the book: "He arrived only a few seconds after his more handsome twin brother and, even though his twin never took a breath, Spooner knew that his dead brother would always be his mother’s favorite child."

3. Bad Things Happen – Harry Dolan
Harry Dolan pays tribute to those who preceded him. Bad Things Happen is of the Raymond Chandler/James Cain/Dashiell Hammett school of mystery writing and this, Dolan's first novel, does not suffer in the comparison. From my review of the book: Its finely-crafted plot, filled with unexpected twists and turns, will keep readers guessing the murderer’s identify all the way to the end – wondering even to the last page if they have it figured out this time.”

4. The Brightest Moon of the Century – Christopher Meeks
This debut novel, based on one of my favorite Chris Meeks short stories, begins when Edward Meopian is 14-years old and ends when he is 45. A lot happens to Edward in those three decades, very little of it planned, and most of it seeming to get him no closer to achieving his dream. And when he does finally get there, life happens. From my review of the book: “Meeks’s characters, and his slightly off-centered view of life, continue to remind me of John Irving’s early work, definitely a good thing.”

5. Etta: A Novel – Gerald Kolpan
If you’re like me, I’ll bet you still have an imaged embedded in your brain of Etta Place riding a bicycle in that classic move about Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. I’ll also bet that pretty much everything you know about Etta Place, you acquired from that one movie. Really, not much is known about Etta and how she became an outlaw, but Gerald Kolpan’s version of “what if” is great fun to read. From my review of the book: “First-time novelist Gerald Kolpan now offers Etta, the perfect companion piece to the movie that reintroduced Etta to the world some forty years ago.”

6. Travel Writing - Peter Ferry
This is a first novel that takes a (excuse me for this) novel approach to storytelling. Peter Ferry is the main character of his own novel and, beginning with the book's dedication, the reader will be wondering what is real and what is not. Ferry pulls off to great effect here one of those "novel within a novel" things and I suspect he drove more than a few readers nuts in the process. From my review of the book: "Peter Ferry is a storyteller and his debut novel, Travel Writing, is one terrific story.

7. American Rust: A Novel - Philipp Meyer
Yet another debut novel, but a much more serious one than the ones previously mentioned, American Rust takes a long, hard look at life in small town America. Meyer's story is a tragic one involving a bright young man whose life goes wrong in an instant, so wrong that he fears he could end up spending the rest of his life in prison. From my review of the book: "American Rust, Philipp Meyer’s debut novel, is a hard story to forget. Beyond a doubt, it is one of the bleakest portrayals of small town America written since the Great Depression and its plot, for good reason, is a reminder of the fiction that came out of that era."

8. Rain Gods: A Novel - James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is a master at his craft, a man I've read since the '80s and whose work I always snap up as soon as it is published. I feel like Dave Robicheaux is a personal friend; I even own a baseball cap that features Dave's old bait shop on the front and I actually wear it around town just to see if anyone gets the joke. Rain Gods, though, is a Hack Holland novel, not one of Dave's. I don't yet feel quite as attached to Hack as I do to Dave but Mr. Burke is getting me closer with every novel. This is one of the most atmospheric novels I've read in a long while and the writing is simply beautiful. Enough said.

9. Woodsburner: A Novel - John Pipkin
Would you believe another excellent debut novel? This one is about what had to be perhaps the worst day in Henry David Thoreau's life, the day he accidentally set fire to the Concord Woods and almost burned down the city of Concord. Pipkin uses this largely forgotten incident from Thoreau's life to create one of the best character studies of 2009. From my review of the book: "In the process of creating a back-history for each of his main characters, Pipkin provides a revealing look at Massachusetts society of the 1840s and theorizes on how Thoreau’s mistake heavily influenced the rest of his life and career."

10. Where Men Win Glory - Jon Krakauer
Pat Tilman is a hero, a special young man who felt it was his duty to defend America after the 9-11 murders. Most everyone knows how Tilman gave up a multi-million dollar contract to join the Army's special forces and of his death in Afghanistan. Jon Krakauer tells the rest of the story, including the military's attempt to cover up what really happened in the tragic firefight that killed Pat Tilman. From my review of the book: "Human nature being what it is, almost from the moment Tillman’s body was recovered, some on the ground seem to have been more concerned with covering up the poor tactical decisions that contributed to his death than they were about reporting the truth."

Bound to Last

At the risk of offending some, let me begin by saying that a multitude of readers question whether an e-book can really be called a book at all.  In the minds of avid readers, those who simply have to read a certain number of pages every day in order to feel whole, e-books are little more than electronic files stashed somewhere on the drives of those little e-reading gadgets they carry when traveling.  And they only use those gadgets because they cannot figure out how to carry comfortably a dozen books while on the road.  They know e-books are a poor substitute for the real thing, but e-books, after all, do beat back pain.

If you recognize yourself in any of what I have said so far, you really need to get your hands on Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book.  This little volume, edited by Sean Manning, explains precisely why e-books can never compare to the real thing.  All of us, I suspect, have one or two favorite books on our shelves, books that we are as much emotionally attached to as anything else we own.  But, think about that for a second.  One’s favorite books, the ones carried around during a lifetime of relocations, are not necessarily favorites because of what is between their covers.  They are just as likely to be favorites because of all the memories attached to their acquisition, or where they were first read, or what family member owned them first, or because they were a gift from a favorite teacher, relative, or long lost friend.  As the back cover of Bound to Last puts it, we love this kind of book “because of its significance as a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable object.”

Following Ray Bradbury’s foreword and Sean Manning’s introduction, thirty diverse writers share their feelings about the one book in their lives they most cherish.  The actual book choices range all the way from The Bible to The Carpetbaggers, with stops along the way to hear about emotional bonding with copies of many of the classics, favorite children’s books, anthologies, a biography, modern novels, and even one cookbook.  Remember, it is not necessarily their contents that make these books so special to their owners.

For Philipp Meyer, author of one of my favorite recent novels, American Rust, that book is For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Meyer, a high school dropout, was fortunate to grow up surrounded by books.  He was lucky, too, that the books were hardbacks and paperbacks, books he could browse at leisure as he developed his reading skills.  Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for the first time changed him forever.  Suddenly, he recognized the difference between popular novels and what the best books have to offer.  Meyer says that he “recently donated that copy to the library at my graduate writing center.  It’s forty-five years old, and tattered, but it continues to be read.  Whereas my Kindle, forty-five years from now, will be buried in a landfill under approximately eleven million other Kindles.”

For Jim Knipfeel the book is Mason & Dixon, not so much because of its contents but because it is the last book he “was able to read in normal fashion.”  Knipfeel went blind while reading Mason & Dixon and had to finish the last 60 pages of the book via its audio version.  For him, “it will always be The Last Book, in more ways than one.”

For West African Chris Abani, that book is James Baldwin’s Another Country, the book that inspired him to become the writer he is today.  Abani discovered the book on his parents’ bookshelf when he was ten years old and he still recognizes the coffee stain he placed on page 72 back in 1992.  Abani recently read this copy of Another Country for the twentieth time and he says that it was a struggle to keep it from falling apart.  Recognizing that it was time to acquire another copy, but not wanting to replace his relic with another paper copy, Abani searched everywhere for an electronic copy for his iPad.  He reports that his search was unsuccessful and that “this makes me sad and extremely happy.”

These are my favorite pieces in Bound to Last, but they are just the beginning of what this book has to offer.  This is one that book lovers will want to read more than once – a book that deserves a place of honor on their bookshelves.  Come on, you know who you are.

Rated at: 5.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)