American Salvage [Paperback]

Bonnie Jo Campbell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 14, 2009

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction; finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. “These short stories approach their subjects from an array of perspectives, but what they share is freshness, surprise, and a compulsion to plumb some absolute extremes of American existence.”—National Book Award citation

American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Bonnie Jo Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The houses are ramshackle, the trucks hard-used, the weather extreme. The men, clad in shabby camouflage, are battered and scarred. They labor at dangerous, soul-killing jobs; hunt; drink too much; and stand by their loved ones no matter how flat-out crazy they are (or they think about killing them). Ditto for the women. Money is tight; the old ways and the precious wildlife are disappearing; loneliness is a plague; and the meth-cookers keep burning down the house. Welcome to rural Michigan, Campbell’s home ground, and a story collection of rare impact. These fine-tuned stories are shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of events, and breathtaking insights. Terrible injuries, accidental and otherwise, leave people and animals in misery, but they are salvaged, maybe even healed. Against all odds, salvation counterbalances loss and despair in unexpected ways in this small place of big feelings, where everyone is yoked together for better and worse, and where, as one persistent survivor observes, “what looked like junk to most people could be worth real money.” Campbell’s busted-broke, damaged, and discarded people are rich in longing, valor, forgiveness, and love, and readers themselves will feel salvaged and transformed by this gutsy book’s fierce compassion. --Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Campbell’s an American voice—two parts healthy fear, one part awe, one part irony, one part realism.” (Los Angeles Times )

“In these stories about cold, lonely, meth-drenched, working-class Michigan life, there’s a certain beauty reaching something like the sublimity of a D. H. Lawrence story.” (Chicago Tribune )

“Starred Review. These fine-tuned stories are shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of events, and breath-taking insights. Campbell’s busted-broke, damaged, and discarded people are rich in longing, valor, forgiveness and love, and readers themselves will feel salvaged and transformed by the gutsy book’s fierce compassion.” (Booklist )

“A strong collection. The pieces are rich in original detail, and highly atmospheric, while maintaining a satisfying sense of familiar territory, local voices.” (Laura Kasischke, author of The Life before Her Eyes )

“American Salvage is not a book for the cowardly. These daring stories, these desperate characters, would just as soon steal your wallet, break your heart or punch you in the gut than openly admit that redemption is possible during these dark times. But it is just this improbable hope that makes her work brilliant. This is Bonnie Jo Campbell at her bravest and best.” (Rachael Perry, author of How to Fly )

“At their best these stories reflect what Robert Lowell refers to as ‘the grace of accuracy,’ which might simply be a way of saying that the voice overall convinces at every turn. By voice I mean personality, and these quirky, surprising, sometimes arcane and visceral and big-hearted stories resonate in ways that keep me nodding. . . . I love the risk of each story and how, in the midst of hilarity, a much more serious concern unfolds so that I’d find myself both laughing out loud and squeezing my heart dry simultaneously.” (Jack Driscoll, author of How Like an Angel )

“The effect of American Salvage is that Campbell’s Michigan lingers and cannot be ignored or forgotten.” (Chicago Literary Scene Examiner )

“‘Beware ye who enter here,’ and yet you should and must because the work is so fine and truthful and deeply human, And you will surely know yourself and your world better for having come.” (Small Press Review )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 170 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (December 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039333919X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393339192
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #96,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm in a house her grandfather built. When she left home for the University of Chicago, her mother rented out her room; she has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the circus. She has led adventure tours in Russia and Eastern Europe. After earning a master's degree in mathematics, Campbell began writing fiction. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Western Michigan University, and now lives in Kalamazoo.

Her most recent book is the collection, American Salvage, about which Alan Cheuse, NPR reviewer has said, "In these stories about cold, lonely, meth-drenched, working-class Michigan life, there's a certain beauty reaching something like the sublimity of a D.H. Lawrence story." She is also the author of Women & Other Animals (University of Massachusetts, 2000), and the novel Q Road (Scribner, 2003). She has won the AWP award for short fictiona Pushcart prize, the Eudora Welty Prize (2009), and she was named a Barnes & Noble Great New Writer. Her fiction has recently been published in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Alaska Review, Boulevard, and Witness. The New York Times has called her stories "Bitter but sweetened by humor," and Publisher's Weekly said Campbell details, "domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread." She feeds donkeys and practices kobudo weapons arts in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Visit her website at www.bonniejocampbell.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Salvage, May 4, 2009

By 

John P. Beck "John P. Beck - Our Daily Work/O... (East Lansing, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Salvage (Made in Michigan Writers) (Paperback)

I just finished Bonnie Jo Campbell's latest book of short stories, AMERICAN SALVAGE (Wayne State University Press, 2009). This is a fascinating book full of 3-D characters who jump off the page. These are people trying to get by, and many times not succeeding, in a world where other people seem to have it all. There are farm families looking for the next way to break even. There are drunks and drug users who try to balance out their lives through violence or love. There are many who remember their best days which are firmly behind them, sometimes in high school, sometimes much earlier. Many of the characters are workers though some not regularly. For others, their steady jobs in the papermills or other factories are far more regular then their off-duty time. My favorite is the dark "Storm Warning" where an accident leaves a man to play out all his anxieties and fears in the midst of a gathering monster of a thunderstorm. Though the title is taken from one of the stories in the collection, it as well could signify the way these well- developed characters and their lives are tossed about to become a flotsam and jetsam of modern life. Everyone in Michigan may enjoy the tie some stories have to the greater Kalamazoo area that Bonnie Jo Campbell calls home. Add this one to the summer (or late spring) reading pile.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Helluva Book, May 25, 2009

By 

Jeff C. Vande Zande "Jeff Vande Zande" (Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Salvage (Made in Michigan Writers) (Paperback)

Here's the straight poop, as they say: American Salvage is a really great read. I could just end it there, but that doesn't feel like enough. Okay, Campbell's characters are really intriguing, and she puts them in strange and sometimes bizarre situations that get at some pretty big human truths. The truths . . . no matter who we are we are prone to addiction, wanting safety, and wanting to love and be loved. We are afraid and we are brave. We get ourselves behind hopeless plans, and sometimes find they are the only plans for us . . . and sometimes we make them work. All of these truths are truths we already know, but in the hands of a story teller like Campbell . . . well, she just takes the reader on a really cool trip. I'm just fascinated by the situation in her "Storm Warning" when the main character, nearly crippled from a boating accident, can't believe that his girlfriend of six months saved his life, rescued him from drowning. So pig-headed and afraid is he that when he returns from the hospital, he drives her away. He finds himself alone in a hospital bed in his house, watching as a horrendous storm blows in, knocking out power around the lake. Helpless, unable to even get a glass of water, he swallows his Vicodin with saliva. He's so utterly alone . . . and he's put himself there. I mean, you have to buy the book just to see how that one turns out. You should buy the book, too, because Bonnie Jo is a Michigan writer. Seriously, you won't be disappointed. Campbell is simply a great writer worth reading.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I read it; then I read it again, June 9, 2009

By 

E. Jennings "Art book lover" (Kalamazoo) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Salvage (Made in Michigan Writers) (Paperback)

In the best collections of short stories the setting becomes a character as well-realized as any of the human characters. In "American Salvage," turn of the 20th Century rural Michigan, home to big, beautiful snakes, white ermine, and deer that dance across the lake, is the backdrop for people with lives of often self-inflicted drama they would never recognize as particularly dramatic. For them it is more an ache in the chest, a wistful longing for a little bit more for folks who don't have a lot and don't expect much. These sometimes explosive tales are told in an understated fashion that keep the characters believable. At the same time the revealing details, like platinum at the core of a piece of scrap metal, give the collection a savage beauty.