American Rust: A Novel [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: weight pile, Billy Poe, Black Larry, Bud Harris (more...)

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.

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.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau; First Edition edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385527519
• ISBN-13: 978-0385527514
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (92 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #133,497 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Contrived scenes, lack of logic hurt Meyer's book , April 5, 2009

By	fra7299 "fra7299" (California, United States) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

Phillip Meyer creates in American Rust an epitome of working class people who struggle through daily lives in Pennsylvania. While his novel to a certain extent embodies this blue collar persona--and the theme of loss and perseverance pervade much of the plot--there is abundance of contrived situations and characters that make the novel lacking.

One of the minor flaws of this work is its repetitive nature, not only in plot but characterization. The chapters are written from the various major characters' points of view, but there is a constant gloomy outlook within each of these narrations, so much so that there is no real differentiation between the two major characters, Isaac and Poe. Yes, these two characters have different lives, and we learn the differences from what the narrator "tells" us about them, but when reading the book from their points of view there seems to be the same gloomy perception about people and life. Many characters seem to have a common attitude of "woe is me"; they are so busy feeling sorry for themselves that could care less about other characters.

Another criticism of the book is the absurdity of logic and motivation of the characters, and, in general, the meandering, contrived scenes and interaction between characters. The idea of how Poe came to be charged with the murder, and Isaac not even a suspect, seemed a little silly. Why does Isaac flee his house and not become a suspect? Poe's actions in jail are pretty head-scratching too (i.e. deciding to assault a guard). And the love affair between Poe's mom and Harris was tolerable at first, but became nauseating as time wore on. At times, it's as if the characters are operating out of a manual entitled "How to mess up your life even more than it already is." It feels as though the attempt is there for characters to pursue their idea of the American Dream, but this is never truly revealed or encountered because they are too busy either wallowing in their own self-pity or acting without restraint.

For the effort of trying to depict a novel about the difficulties of life, and the need to try to overcome obstacles and problems, I applaud Meyer. There is definite promise in this work, and there are moments when he can capture the essence of hope in the midst of defeat. I appreciate any effort anyone takes to put forth writing a book, and, being that this is his debut, Meyer will definitely be better with his next go, but American Rust came across as somewhat mediocre.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fayette Nam: Bringing It All Back Home, March 15, 2009

By	terence hawkins - See all my reviews

I'm either the best person to review this book or the worst. The book is set in Fayette County ("Fayette Nam") PA; the chief characters are two friends, Isaac the high school brainiac and Poe the football hero, and the Lee, Isaac's sister, who somehow escaped to Yale. As it happens I grew up in Fayette County and made it to New Haven myself.

On the one hand I found Meyer's depiction of the physically beautiful and economically desolate Mon Valley deeply compelling and painfully accurate. On the other----and this is probably just me---I found his departures from physical reality disconcerting; Fayette County is shown as a swath of shuttered mills rather than played out coal mines----a big difference to the grandson and nephew of coal miners. And while I found Isaac and Poe completely authentic, as individuals as well as friends, Lee didn't come off as well. Having her marry some rich guy in Darien immediately after graduation so she can roll down to Fayette in a white Mercedes to save the day and pick up her relationship with Poe was a bit much. Similarly naming a character sacrificed to his father's disability "Isaac" seemed a little heavy-handed; I found myself underlining "sacrifice" every time it appeared in the text.

All that said I thought this was a really great book. It brought me back home. I hope it's as evocative for another reader whose home is elsewhere.