American Rust: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle) [Paperback]

Philipp Meyer (Author)

Book Description

Series: Random House Reader's Circle | Publication Date: January 12, 2010

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.


Newsweek's list of "Best. Books. Ever"
Amazon Top 100 book of 2009
A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009
A New York Times Notable Book of 2009
An Economist Best Book of 2009
A Kansas City Star Top 100 book of 2009
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Best Books of 2009
Idaho Statesman's Best Books of 2009

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, February 2009: Buell, Pennsylvania lies in ruins, a dying--if not already dead--steel town, where even the lush surrounding country seethes with concealed industrial toxins. When Isaac English and Billy Poe--a pair of high-school friends straight out of Steinbeck--embark on a starry-eyed cross-country escape to California, a violent encounter with a trio of transients leaves one dead, prying the lid off a rusted can of failed hope and small-town secrets. American Rust is Philipp Meyer's first novel, and his taut, direct prose strikes the perfect tone for this kaleidoscope of fractured dreams, elevating a book that otherwise might be relentlessly dour to the level of honest and unflinching storytelling. (Interestingly, Meyer has a fan in Patricia Cornwell, who name-checked American Rust in her latest novel, Scarpetta, even though Meyer's book hadn't been released yet.) --Jon Foro

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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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (January 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385527527
• ISBN-13: 978-0385527521
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (125 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #81,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philipp Meyer grew up in Baltimore, dropped out of high school, and got his GED when he was sixteen. After spending several years volunteering at a trauma center in downtown Baltimore, he attended Cornell University, where he studied English. Since graduating, Meyer has worked as a derivatives trader at UBS, a construction worker, and an EMT, among other jobs. His writing has been published in McSweeney's, The Iowa Review, Salon.com, and New Stories from the South. From 2005 to 2008 Meyer was a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. He splits his time between Texas and upstate New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommend, February 17, 2009

By 

Lee Shipman (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Rust: A Novel (Hardcover)

I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of American Rust, a powerful debut novel and a rare find: compelling literary fiction with the engine of a gripping thriller. The story of the fallout of a murder on a group of connected characters is set in an economically depressed region of Pennsylvania whose struggle, like so many of these people, is all the more difficult in the (often literal) shadow of its former greatness and promise. And that's what Meyer does so well here, beyond creating a engrossing page-turner -- we get to know all of these terrifically realized characters through their perspective, and those intimate portraits web together to give us something bigger: the complex relationship between people and place, individuals and community. And though the characters are all bound by this dying town and the blowback of the crime that affects them all, the division of the story into these individual perspectives gives a real sense of their isolation; the characters might find salvation in each other, if they could only communicate their need for it. American Rust is an overall outstanding read from a major new talent.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally! A New Novel I Can Love, June 23, 2009

By 

Daniel Bell (Northeast Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Rust: A Novel (Hardcover)

As my four regular readers can attest, I do not have much good to say about the contemporary novelists held in high regard by literary critics and prize juries. As a rule, I don't trust the taste of book critics. Too many have joined the Cult of the Sentence, deeming that fiction best that piles up the most standout sentences, imagery and "lyrical" language, the accumulated weight of which apparently makes a novel literature with a capital L. It's been a long time since I picked up a book from the New Fiction shelf at the bookstore, read the first page and walked to the register with it. The triumph of style over story in modern literary fiction leaves me cold, bitter and buying classics.

Then I read a couple of reviews of American Rust. (Yes, I still do read reviews, even the New York Times Book Review, hoping against all evidence for change, going back again and again like an abused spouse.) The only thing in the reviews that got me looking for the novel was the subject matter: the effect of industrial collapse on America workers. Being from a long line of working class rednecks, I decided to give another new author a chance based on that alone.

And I'm glad I did. Philipp Meyer has produced a book that, by the end, had me comparing his novel to Richard Wright's Native Son and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Like them, he masterfully weaves into the story the socioeconomic and political pressures that bear on the lives of his characters without preaching, without beating us over the head with a morality tale. Yet you can't come away from it without knowing in your bones the corrosive effects of industrial decline on the lives of his working class characters. He has deep sympathy for all of his characters, the "good" and the "bad." Each character has their own trajectory, and Meyer makes it inseparable from what sent them in the direction they take.

While Meyer does have one stylistic quirk I found annoying--he sometimes drops commas and periods that interrupt the natural flow of his sentences--for the most part the writing is straight forward, lacking the self-conscious poetic flourishes so much a part of contemporary literary writing. His prose serves the story rather than call attention to the author.

Buy American Rust. Don't take it out of the library. The author deserves the royalty, and I don't say that about many authors these days. I look forward to more Philipp Meyer.

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Experience That Comes Back to Haunt You, February 1, 2009

By 

Melinda Seifert - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Rust: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was privileged to receive an advance readers copy of American Rust. As the characters developed I found myself intrigued by the choices we make in life that take us where we go. The writing is dramatic, the plot intense and the story compelling. I can't believe this is Philipp Meyer's first novel. I know it sounds corny, but reading American Rust I was struck with the thought that if you had a little Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway and Steinbeck--you'd have Philipp Meyer.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who reads books for their literary value and who value the imagery that creates the type of experience that comes back to haunt you long after you've read the last sentence and closed the book.