The Dirt Nap

“American Rust,” by Philipp Meyer, 2009

This is a fictional story of the U.S. ‘rust belt,’ specifically the Monongahela Valley south of Pittsburgh on the ‘Hillbilly Highway.’  It hits all the familiar problems with capitalism around 2007 – the massive and rusting steel mills closed due to automation, competition and outsourcing; the continued use of coal; a meth tweaker epidemic; suicide and homelessness; boarded-up stores and no good jobs; piecework and volunteer work; the intentional defunding of the mills by the U.S. steel capitalists. This is the book’s benefit and truth. It is background and foreground both. 

Meyer tracks the impact deindustrialization had on the people of the Valley – specifically six of them.  At the end it becomes a fictional equivalent of Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” – showing the human fuckupedness of everyone left standing in coal and steel country, with not a drop of politics anywhere.  No one draws a conclusion or takes action except for dreams of escape.  You see, it is ‘in the blood.’

The characters are Issac, a geeky, skinny kid excellent at math and astronomy, but a bit of a failure at reality.  His unlikely friend Poe, a tough, large ex-football player who enjoys fighting and doesn’t know when to quit.  Grace, Poe’s dependent middle-aged mother, who spends too much time with useless husbands and other mistakes.  Harris, a kind and a killer cop at the same time.  Lee, the bright student who got out of the Valley in time.  And Issac’s dad Henry, who lives too long for anyone’s good.  All sad as shit.

Meyer has an MFA in writing, a suspect degree I usually make fun of.  However here his subject is not the middle-class, over-the-top aestheticism or some ‘cool’ assassin, but those human lives destroyed by capital and ignored by most writers.  Kudos. The book rings true in this sense.  It has happened.  Steelworkers will approve.  But the absence of politics is telling.  Apolitical fiction is the rage in MFA programs, you see.

However, and there is always a however.  We have one killing, two murders, two suicides, two attempted suicides, three bloody fights in prison, several others outside of prison in hobo land, two robberies and several adulteries.  This as part of a narrative of hoboes and heroes. Most ex-steelworkers might balk at this swirl of incidents.  The book ultimately becomes a character study centered around a high and unlikely melodrama – a melodrama that seems overkill.  Literally.  After all, homeless people deserve to die because they are all criminals.  In the book, they are the approved victims in the process of protecting two local youths, including a David who slays a Swedish goliath with a stone.  Self-defense, as a lawyer might put it, is justified in this case - but ignored in the narrative to increase tension.  Instead we have a sacrificial Jesus and a failed legal system for the indigent.

Bleached Industrial Bones of a Lost Civilization

The real star is the Monongahela Valley in Pennsylvania and West Virginia - nature itself, rising above the temporary blinking lives of the humans.  Beautiful vistas, forests, hills, rivers and streams.  The deer come out as the humans suffer. The other stars, flitting around the edges, are the ‘bright’ people who go to Yale or Harvard and get the fuck away from the awful economics of trailer-life.  And here again we see Vance’s elegy, the stuck at-home benighted and the runners, the proletarian and the educated professional strata, the stupid and the smart, the addicts and the clean, the emotional and the intellectual.  As if intelligence only dwelt in these narrow realms.  This is the sad deposit that must be paid for an MFA.

As Ayn Rand maintained, the poor are a collection of individual failures and there is a perhaps unintentional echo of that here in this book.

Meyer writes in short sentences, in a staccato manner sometimes, immersed in the characters repeated thoughts.  He’s done his research and lays out the towns, nature and industrial bone structure of the Valley well – train tracks, mills, factories, power plants, refineries, barge traffic, locks.  A book that is worth reading, though in need of an edit and a strong dose of proletarian politics.  As the saying goes, fiction is many times more true than ‘non-fiction’ - which is why I review fiction books and why you should read them.

P.S. "American Rust" is now a streaming series.  The same sad crew of messes, with some added and unlikely side-stories, populate this story.  All of them make over-the-top somewhat crazy emotional mistakes - the duck-faced uncontrollable mother, the aging lovelorn cop, the impulsive footballer, the clueless gay son, the supposedly smart lost-love who didn't get away, the dying and obnoxious sick father.  In this series, the rust is inside them, not inside the system.

Other reviews that focus on Appalachia below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance); “White Trash,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Gray Mountain,” “The Hunger Games.”

The Kulture Kommissar

October 9, 2019

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia