Customer Reviews

American Salvage

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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.

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.

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.

If you're looking for a collection of short stories that have interesting characters, interesting settings, and plots with beginnings, middles and ends, and you don't want to buy a book that ends up being a showcase for an MFA's broad vocabulary and creative punctuation, this book is for you.

For those of you that just slogged though my effort at an MFA sentence, I apologize. For those giving me another chance to capture your attention, I thank you.

These short stories are tightly connected. All deal with people that today's knowledge based economy has left behind. In order to compete, these characters need the best possible economy, one where workers with no technical or social skills are in high demand. Some of the characters arc into people that might go onto to improve their lots in life. Others give me the keenest of understandings why some people perpetually make bad decisions. All left me trying to classify perpetually bad decision making as either a birth defect of something people work on and can reverse.

What makes these disadvantaged characters unique in contemporary American literature is that they are white and of Western European descent, a category demographers tell us will be a minority by the 2040's.

People often wonder why readership in the USA is so low. The answer is, because there is not enough material like this to read.

It was a fluke I ran into American Salvage, having been turned off to reading for some time. Wow. I felt every character, didn't want the stories to end. Then I read Women & Other Animals. I do hope Bonnie Jo Campbell publishes more books. I love this author.

I've always been drawn to stories about people down on their luck, people living in small towns from which the good jobs have long ago fled. I like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. I like Steinbeck. I like Carolyn Chute's novels about the Maine that exists far from the coastal rim of lobsters and summer cottages. So why didn't I like "American Salvage," a book set in the bypassed little towns of Michigan, as much as I thought I would?

To be sure, the world of mobile homes, clandestine meth labs, broken families, and low wage jobs that Campbell depicts is convincing. Some of the stories, like "Trespasser" and "The Inventor," are a pleasure to read because they are so tightly constructed, with a little ration of events you don't expect.

What I found disappointing is the lack of detail. There is little in these stories, other than some place names (and perhaps family names, I don't know) that ties them to a particular place. They could be set in rural or small town Northern- Climate-Anywhere. I think this is because much of what happens in these stories is conveyed by interior monologue---that is, characters puzzling things out in their heads. The landscape is just a kind of set: auto body shops, struggling farms, and so on. You can close your eyes and see it before you ever open the book.

Campbell's portrayal of the characters in "American Salvage" is sympathetic. You understand that she want to convey their pain and their dignity. (There is little happiness to convey.) However, in the end, she gives us characters that are more successful in representing a Condition (poverty, lack of opportunity) than they are in making us believe in them as complicated human beings.

M. Feldman

"American Salvage" digs down in the land of meth, junkyards, mud, Jim Beam, Vicodin, working men and working women and rusted El Caminos. The feeling you get in reading these stories is that you are an invisible interloper, given a chance to tour a world where life is all hard edges, where progress means getting through the day. You're not sure if these people know they are in pain. They are making do. The rural Michigan scenery isn't scenery---it's whatever the land coughs up. The landscape is harsh, but Campbell's characters are no less compelling for their heart and their desires. Violence lingers close by and lunges without warning, as it does in "King Sole's American Salvage," in a flash.

You wince reading the opening of "The Inventor," as a thirteen-year-old girl gets hit by a car and finds herself injured on the roadside, staring at her broken fibula. A man in hunter's camouflage gets out of the car and comes to her aid. "Her heart pounds as he leans close, pounds harder when she sees the other side of his face, the scar, chin to temple, edged in white, a swath of flesh so raw-looking it seems as though it might melt and drip on her. She cannot back away, so she wishes momentarily to die, or at least to faint." The story switches to the hunter's point of view and you slowly come to realize that the two have a common friend and common tragedy in their past.

"Boar Taint" involves a trek to buy a severely underwhelming, nicked-up and mucked-up hog. You watch a woman carry out her plan on behalf of her husband, Ernie. "The boar hog was advertised on a card at the grocery store for only twenty-five dollars, but the Jentzen farm was going to be a long, slow drive, farther down LaSalle Road than Jill had traveled, past where the blacktop gives way to gravel and farther past, where it twists and turns and becomes a rutted two track. Ernie was finishing the milking when Jill hooked up the stock trailer. He had given her directions already, but before she pulled away, he came out and stood beside the truck and studied her, the way he'd done when she went to Ann Arbor last time. They'd been married almost a year, but maybe he hadn't been sure she was coming back."

Throughout, Campbell's voice is authoritative. She's as much reporter as writer. Campbell sees human struggles and brutality and thinks "these are people too and their lives need to be told." The result is up-close portrait of true grit. No gloss, no sheen--just the sensation of muscle moving bone.

Bonnie Jo Campbell writes some of the best stories in America today, from fantastical to hyper-realistic. In American Salvage she gives an elevated beauty to the downtrodden life without sacrificing believable characters or shying away from harsh situations. The stories are superbly crafted and rich in detail and soulfulness. She's also funny. If you love this book, which you will, you will also love her stories in Women and Other Animals.

It's pretty rare that I read something anymore that makes me rethink the writing I'm doing, and what it's about . . . but this book is certainly one of those occasions. Campbell captures the pathos of rural living so well -- her setting is Michigan, but it could be anywhere -- that it is almost overwhelming in all its bleakness and despair, with a little hope sprinkled here and there. This is as good a collection of stories as I've ever read. Highlights for me include "The Yard Man," "The Solutions to Brian's Problem" and "Boar Taint." Great, great stuff.

In a literary world where disposable books about shopaholics, arm candy and upper middle class angst are all the rage, it's nice to discover a book devoted to the lives of ordinary people. Sure, the stories in American Salvage may never get turned into hit films, but they offer up a look at American life lacking from much of today's contemporary literary fiction. The struggles of the white working class, often forgotten in the popular imagination, are the focus of this incredible collection of stories. So incredible that American Salvage was nominated for a National Book Award, which is nearly unheard of for short story collections.

Campbell's currency is the tragedy of everyday life, of people living on the margins of society, teetering toward financial and personal ruin. Meth, alcohol, crime and violence all play their part, and many of the characters are reminiscent of people I know, family members and old friends long gone. There is a indisputable honesty and truth to these stories, and though they might not always hit every beat, they always vividly bring their characters to life.

Like other readers, I am reminded of Denis Johnson's beautiful Jesus' Son (probably my favorite book of all time), although there is no central narrator to tie the stories together. Campbell's use of language and the original lives and situations she crafts are nearly as good as Johnson's, and each story ends on an emotional swell that sticks with you long after you've finished it.

Highly recommended.