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Philipp Meyer

American Rust: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle) Paperback – January 12, 2010

by Philipp Meyer (Author)

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NOW A SHOWTIME ORIGINAL TV SERIES • A “bold, absorbing novel” (The New York Times Book Review) of the lost American dream, the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love that arise from its loss, and two young men, bound to their hometown, who crave an escape.

“Powerful . . . gripping . . . in the tradition that stretches from Ernest Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy.”—The Washington Post

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Economist •Pittsburgh Post-Gazette • Newsweek • Kansas City Star • Idaho Statesman

Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother dies by suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown, a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town. 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.

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400 pages
Language

English
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Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication date

January 12, 2010
Dimensions

5.48 x 0.86 x 8.17 inches
ISBN-10

0385527527
ISBN-13

978-0385527521
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Popular Highlights in this book

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All the things you needed to know in life—you didn’t learn them until you’d already made your decisions.
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Your only duty—make the best of it. The only true sin—not appreciating life.
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By a certain age, people had their own trajectory. The best you could do was try to nudge them into a different course, though for the most part, it was like trying to catch a body falling from a skyscraper.
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From the Publisher

Publisher’s Weekly says, “Meyer has a thrilling eye for failed dreams… Fans of Cormac McCarthy…”

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for American Rust

“A novel as splendidly crafted and original as any written in recent decades, American Rust is both darkly disturbing and richly compelling. Philipp Meyer’s first novel signals the arrival of a new voice in American letters.”—Patricia Cornwell, author of Scarpetta

“With its strong narrative engine and understated social insight, American Rust is reminiscent of the best of Robert Stone and Russell Banks. Author Philipp Meyer locates the heart of his working class characters without false sentiment or condescension, and their world is artfully described. An extraordinary, compelling novel from a major talent.”—George Pelecanos, author of The Turnaround

“This is strong, clean stuff. Philipp Meyer deserves to be taken seriously.”—Pete Dexter, author of Paper Trails

“Philipp Meyer's American Rust is written with considerable dramatic intensity and pace. It manages an emotional accuracy, a deep and detailed conviction in its depiction of character. It also captures a sense of a menacing society, a wider world in the throes of decay and self-destruction.”—Colm Tóibín, author of The Master

“Meyer has a thrilling eye for failed dreams and writes uncommonly tense scenes of violence . . . Fans of Cormac McCarthy or Dennis Lehane will find in Meyer an author worth watching.”—Publishers Weekly

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Book One
1.

Isaac's mother was dead five years but he hadn't stopped thinking about her. He lived alone in the house with the old man, twenty, small for his age, easily mistaken for a boy. Late morning and he walked quickly through the woods toward town--a small thin figure with a backpack, trying hard to keep out of sight. He'd taken four thousand dollars from the old man's desk; Stolen, he corrected himself. The nuthouse prisonbreak. Anyone sees you and it's Silas get the dogs.
Soon he reached the overlook: green rolling hills, a muddy winding river, an expanse of forest unbroken except for the town of Buell and its steelmill. The mill itself had been like a small city, but they had closed it in 1987, partially dismantled it ten years later; it now stood like an ancient ruin, its buildings grown over with bittersweet vine, devil's tear thumb, and tree of heaven. The footprints of deer and coyotes crisscrossed the grounds; there was only the occasional human squatter.
Still, it was a quaint town: neat rows of white houses wrapping the hillside, church steeples and cobblestone streets, the tall silver domes of an Orthodox cathedral. A place that had recently been well-off, its downtown full of historic stone buildings, mostly boarded now. On certain blocks there was still a pretense of keeping the trash picked up, but others had been abandoned completely. Buell, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Fayette-nam, as it was often called.
Isaac walked the railroad tracks to avoid being seen, though there weren't many people out anyway. He could remember the streets at shiftchange, the traffic stopped, the flood of men emerging from the billet mill coated with steeldust and flickering in the sunlight; his father, tall and shimmering, reaching down to lift him. That was before the accident. Before he became the old man.
It was forty miles to Pittsburgh and the best way was to follow the tracks along the river--it was easy to jump a coal train and ride as long as you wanted. Once he made the city, he'd jump another train to California. He'd been planning this for a month. A long time overdue. Think Poe will come along? Probably not.

On the river he watched barges and a towboat pass, engines droning. It was pushing coal. Once the boat was gone the air got quiet and the water was slow and muddy and the forests ran down to the edge and it could have been anywhere, the Amazon, a picture from National Geographic. A bluegill jumped in the shallows--you weren't supposed to eat the fish but everyone did. Mercury and PCB. He couldn't remember what the letters stood for but it was poison.
In school he'd tutored Poe in math, though even now he wasn't sure why Poe was friends with him--Isaac English and his older sister were the two smartest kids in town, the whole Valley, probably; the sister had gone to Yale. A rising tide, Isaac had hoped, that might lift him as well. He'd looked up to his sister most of his life, but she had found a new place, had a husband in Connecticut that neither Isaac nor his father had met. You're doing fine alone, he thought. The kid needs to be less bitter. Soon he'll hit California--easy winters and the warmth of his own desert. A year to get residency and apply to school: astrophysics. Lawrence Livermore. Keck Observatory and the Very Large Array. Listen to yourself--does any of that still make sense?
Outside the town it got rural again and he decided to walk the trails to Poe's house instead of taking the road. He climbed steadily along. He knew the woods as well as an old poacher, kept notebooks of drawings he'd made of birds and other animals, though mostly it was birds. Half the weight of his pack was notebooks. He liked being outside. He wondered if that was because there were no people, but he hoped not. It was lucky growing up in a place like this because in a city, he didn't know, his mind was like a train where you couldn't control the speed. Give it a track and direction or it cracks up. The human condition put names to everything: bloodroot rockflower whip-poor-will, tulip bitternut hackberry. Shagbark and pin oak. Locust and king_nut. Plenty to keep your mind busy.
Meanwhile, right over your head, a thin blue sky, see clear to outer space: the last great mystery. Same distance to Pittsburgh--couple miles of air and then four hundred below zero, a fragile blanket. Pure luck. Odds are you shouldn't be alive--think about that, Watson. Can't say it in public or they'll put you in a straitjacket.

Except eventually the luck runs out--your sun turns into a red giant and the earth is burned whole. Giveth and taketh away. The entire human race would have to move before that happened and only the physicists could figure out how, they were the ones who would save people. Of course by then he'd be long dead. But at least he'd have made his contribution. Being dead didn't excuse your responsibility to the ones still alive. If there was anything he was sure of, it was that.

Poe lived at the top of a dirt road in a doublewide trailer that sat, like many houses outside town, on a large tract of woodland. Eighty acres, in this case, a frontier sort of feeling, a feeling of being the last man on earth, protected by all the green hills and hollows.
There was a muddy four-wheeler sitting in the yard near Poe's old Camaro, its three-thousand-dollar paintjob and blown transmission. Metal sheds in various states of collapse, a Number 3 Dale Earnhardt flag pinned across one of them, a wooden game pole for hanging deer. Poe was sitting at the top of the hill, looking out toward the river from his folding chair. If you could find a way to pay your mortgage, people always said, it was like living on God's back acre.
The whole town thought Poe would go to college to keep playing ball, not exactly Big Ten material but good enough for somewhere, only two years later here he was, living in his mother's trailer, sitting in the yard and looking like he intended to cut firewood. This week or maybe next. A year older than Isaac, his glory days already past, a dozen empty beer cans at his feet. He was tall and broad and squareheaded and at two hundred forty pounds, more than twice the size of Isaac. When he saw him, Poe said:

"Getting rid of you for good, huh?"
"Hide your tears," Isaac told him. He looked around. "Where's your bag?" It was a relief to see Poe, a distraction from the stolen money in his pocket.
Poe grinned and sipped his beer. He hadn't showered in days--he'd been laid off when the town hardware store cut its hours and was putting off applying to Wal-Mart as long as possible.
"As far as coming along, you know I've got all this stuff to take care of." He waved his arm generally at the rolling hills and woods in the distance. "No time for your little caper."
"You really are a coward, aren't you?"
"Christ, Mental, you can't seriously want me to come with you."
"I don't care either way," Isaac told him.
"Looking at it from my own selfish point of view, I'm still on goddamn probation. I'm better off robbing gas stations."
"Sure you are."
"You ain't gonna make me feel guilty. Drink a beer and sit down a minute."
"I don't have time," said Isaac.
Poe glanced around the yard in exasperation, but finally he stood up. He finished the rest of his drink and crumpled the can. "Alright," he said. "I'll ride with you up to the Conrail yard in the city. But after that, you're on your own."

From a distance, from the size of them, they might have been father and son. Poe with his big jaw and his small eyes and even now, two years out of school, a nylon football jacket, his name and player number on the front and buell eagles on the back. Isaac short and skinny, his eyes too large for his face, his clothes too large for him as well, his old backpack stuffed with his sleeping bag, a change of clothes, his notebooks. They went down the narrow dirt road toward the river, mostly it was woods and meadows, green and beautiful in the first weeks of spring. They passed an old house that had tipped face-first into a sinkhole--the ground in the Mid-Mon Valley was riddled with old coal mines, some properly stabilized, others not. Isaac winged a rock and knocked a ventstack off the roof. He'd always had a good arm, better than Poe's even, though of course Poe would never admit it.

Just before the river they came to the Cultrap farm with its cows sitting in the sun, heard a pig squeal for a long time in one of the outbuildings.

"Wish I hadn't heard that."
"Shit," said Poe. "Cultrap makes the best bacon around."
"It's still something dying."
"Maybe you should stop analyzing it."
"You know they use pig hearts to fix human hearts. The valves are basically the same."
"I'm gonna miss your factoids."
"Sure you will."
"I was exaggerating," said Poe. "I was being ironic."
They continued to walk.
"You know I would seriously owe you if you came with."
"Me and Jack Kerouac Junior. Who stole four grand from his old man and doesn't even know where the money came from."
"He's a cheap bastard with a steelworker's pension. He's got plenty of money now that he's not sending it all to my sister."
"Who probably needed it."
"Who graduated from Yale with about ten scholarships while I stayed back and looked after Little Hitler."
Poe sighed. "Poor angry Isaac."
"Who wouldn't be?"
"Well to share some wisdom from my own father, wherever you go, you still wake up and see the same face in the mirror."
"Words to live by."
"The old man's been around some."
"You're right about that."
"Come on now, Mental."

They turned north along the river, toward Pittsburgh; to the south it was state forest and coal mines. The coal was the reason for steel. They passed another old plant and its smokestack, it wasn't just steel, there were dozens of smaller industries that supported the mills and were supported by them: tool and die, specialty coating, mining equipment, the list went on. It had been an intricate system and when the mills shut down, the entire Valley had collapsed. Steel had been the heart. He wondered how long it would be before it all rusted away to nothing and the Valley returned to a primitive state. Only the stone would last.

For a hundred years the Valley had been the center of steel production in the country, in the entire world, technically, but in the time since Poe and Isaac were born, the area had lost 150,000 jobs--most of the towns could no longer afford basic services; many no longer had any police. As Isaac had overheard his sister tell someone from college: half the people went on welfare and the other half went back to hunting and gathering. Which was an exaggeration, but not by much.
There was no sign of any train and Poe was walking a step ahead, there was only the sound of the wind coming off the river and the gravel crunching under their feet. Isaac hoped for a long one, which all the bends in the river would keep slow. The shorter trains ran a lot faster; it was dangerous to try to catch them.

He looked out over the river, the muddiness of it, the things buried underneath. Different layers and all kinds of old crap buried in the muck, tractor parts and dinosaur bones. You aren't at the bottom but you aren't exactly at the surface, either. You are having a hard time seeing things. Hence the February swim. Hence the ripping off the old man. Feels like days since you've been home but it has probably only been two or three hours; you can still go back. No. Plenty of things worse than stealing, lying to yourself for example, your sister and the old man being champions in that. Acting like the last living souls.

Whereas you yourself take after your mother. Stick around and you're bound for the nuthouse. Embalming table. Stroll on the ice in February, the cold like being shocked. So cold you could barely breathe but you stayed until it stopped hurting, that was how she slipped in. Take it for a minute and you start to go warm. A life lesson. You would not have risen until now--April--the river gets warmer and the things that live inside you, quietly without you knowing it, it is them that make you rise. The teacher taught you that. Dead deer in winter look like bones, though in summer they swell their skins. Bacteria. Cold keeps them down but they get you in the end.
You're doing fine, he thought. Snap out of it.

But of course he could remember Poe dragging him out of the water, telling Poe I wanted to see what it felt like is all. Simple experiment. Then he was under the trees, it was dark and he was running, mud-covered, crashing through deadfall and fernbeds, there was a rushing in his ears and he came out in someone's field. Dead leaves crackling; he'd been cold so long he no longer felt cold at all. He knew he was at the end. But Poe had caught up to him again.

"Sorry what I said about your dad," he told Poe now.
"I don't give a shit," said Poe.
"We gonna keep walking like this?"
"Like what?"
"Not talking."
"Maybe I'm just being sad."
"Maybe you need to man up a little." Isaac grinned but Poe stayed serious.
"Some of us have their whole lives ahead of them. Others--"
"You can do whatever you want."
"Lay off it," said Poe.
Isaac let him walk ahead. The wind was picking up and snapping their clothes.
"You good to keep going if this storm comes in?"
"Not really," said Poe.
"There's an old plant up there once we get out of these woods. We can find a place to wait it out in there."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Spiegal & Grau Paperback Edition (January 12, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385527527
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385527521
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.48 x 0.86 x 8.17 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #82,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #914 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #2,210 in Family Saga Fiction
- #6,397 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Philipp Meyer

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Philipp Meyer grew up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, where he dropped out of high school and got a GED. After five years working as a bike mechanic and an orderly in a trauma center, he decided to attend college, getting into Cornell University at the age of 22. He graduated with a degree in English and he got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader. After paying off his student loans, he left Wall Street hoping write full time, but after several years of failure moved back to Baltimore and took jobs as an EMT and construction worker. In 2005 he received a fellowship from the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers. In 2009 he published his first novel American Rust, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was an Economist Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington Post Book of the Year, and made numerous other “best-of” list. Meyer is a Guggenheim Fellow and one of the second generation of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40. His second novel, The Son, is being published in fifteen languages. He lives mostly in Austin, Texas.

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jonathan briggs

American rust

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 19, 2012

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Buell, Pa., may not have been the proudest imaginary town never put on a map, but at least it was working steadily once upon a time. Then the steel mills closed, and in that death, so died the surrounding community. As in many of America's gutted towns, the very young and the old stay, but "all the smart ones leave." Lee and Isaac English are two of the smart ones. Lee went to college at Yale and married rich, leaving her younger brother to take care of their father, Henry, disabled in a mill accident. Isaac has had enough of playing dutiful son to a distant dad and decides to go to California with $4,000 stolen from the old man's pension. On the way to catch a train hobo-style, he picks up an escort from his drunken buddy Billy Poe, a trailer-trash man-child former high school jock who sponges off his mother, Grace. When a storm breaks, they take shelter in an abandoned factory and get involved in a turf tussle with three bums, one of whom Isaac kills. It's arguably a case of self-defense, but Isaac and Poe flee the scene. Isaac stays around town long enough to get pissed off when Poe and a visiting Lee resume an affair from high school. Fed up with their carrying on, Isaac goes back to his original plan and plays like Roger Miller on a train to Detroit, leaving Poe to face the pokey when Police Chief Bud Harris investigates the bum's killing. Poe would have been incarcerated a long time ago over an earlier violent altercation that left a boy permanently damaged, but Harris, in an on-again off-again relationship with Grace, got him off the hook. Not this time. Poe's going away, and anyone who's seen a prison movie in the past 40 years knows what kinda shenanigans they get up to in there. Meanwhile, Isaac finds out in his own way what a crappy world it is out there, beaten, robbed and starving.

Meyer crawls right into the minds of his six main characters, riding their thoughtstreams for a chapter at a time, scarcely pausing to punctuate. These passages can blur together and get a bit repetitive. At some point, every person in the book stops to ruminate on ephemeral existence, inevitable mortality and the inconsequentiality of it all in a great, wide, uncaring universe. Poe may be the book's most fascinating character. This would be a much less interesting novel if it was the standard male-bonding, no-snitching tale. There's something more complex going on here. Poe's motivations could launch a thousand book club discussions. Why does he button up and take the rap for Isaac? As friends, they don't seem all that close, particularly considering that Isaac could just take off like he does, rarely giving a thought to what might be happening to Poe. So why would Poe sacrifice himself? A martyrdom complex? Guilt over the crime he wasn't punished for? A wrong-headed sense of purpose that he's finally doing something right after a life largely wasted? Middle-finger stubbornness? Or just plain ol' stupidity?

This kind of book could easily have turned into an Oprah-approved sob story like "House of Sand and Fog," in which no one was responsible for anything, everyone was a victim of bad luck and circumstance and nothing was anybody's fault. Not here. Every one of the characters in "Rust" has a choice. They have enough self-awareness to realize they're not totally victims of fortune and society, they've each played a part in their own predicament thru poor judgment, fear of change or pure self-destructive bloody-mindedness. Maybe it's twisted, maybe my attitude comes from quite a personal history of screw-ups, but I have slightly more respect for a person who can face his own messes even if he can't quit making them. "It was not some unfair twist of fate, he had not been born a refugee, it was his own choices, he could be a man about it. He could accept the consequences." This in no way lets off the hook the rampant sociopathy that passes for corporate management these days. "American Rust" brims with righteous anger at the CEOs getting rich making others poor. "You could not have a country, not this big, that didn't make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually." Sooner, rather than later, I fear.

Against such a bleak backdrop, the book's quiet grace notes stand out more sharply. They're nothing dramatic. Just banal little acts of kindness people may perform when they think no one's looking. That undercover ordinariness makes such acts paradoxically special and gives glimmers of hope that it's not all swirling down the toilet as fast as we might think. Some might accuse "American Rust" of being miserabilist, but then some might accuse me of being miserabilist as well, so we got along just fine. In Philipp Meyer, we have a first-time novelist good enough to join Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos on the border between crime fiction and the chronicles of America's (not) working class.

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Tiz Huber

poignant and dark

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2023

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A story of poverty and politics and youth and yearning. Once in the story you can’t stop but you don’t really want to continue either. You will ponder it for some time.

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Jack Kruse

Kruse's Keys: Read "American Rust" To Feel the Decline of American Steel-Making (in your very bones)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 1, 2018

Verified Purchase

I first encountered Meyer’s writing back in 2015 by way of S.C. Gwynne’s incredible Empire of the Summer Moon. His story of Quanah Parker, the offspring of a kidnapped white woman and a Comanche, who went on to become one to become one of the greatest native American warriors of all time led me to Meyer’s The Son (now an AMC mini-series). Meyer’s well-researched piece of Texas history (well, historical fiction) has a central character that is kidnapped by Indians as a child.
All that to say, The Son was so well written that I was eager to read anything else written by Meyer. That led me to Meyer’s first novel, American Rust, which reads like a sorrowful swan song to the American rust belt. The story brings to light the consequences of the steel industry’s death as the reader is drawn into the lives of several families and their struggle to love, survive, and escape. The narrative centers in on the plight of Billy Poe, a driftless, could-have-been, washed up former high school football star, and Isaac, an unmoored genius who struggles to escape the gravity of his impoverished circumstances. Throw in a little murder and a love triangle and you have a story you won’t soon forget. My only critique is that I wished Meyer had wrapped up the story a little more neatly but we can leave that for the eventual movie version.

Key Quotes:
You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.”
“this is what it means to get old, you don’t look forward to pleasure so much as easing pain.”
“Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard- you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else. ”
“And one day...there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he didn't know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn't make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.”

Key Takeaways:
Lee English is the one character that escapes the gravity of the town and graduates from Yale University, later marrying into a wealthy family. In commenting on her cohort of acquaintances in colleges she comments that most of them will never experience the feeling on wanting something and never getting it. She views this as a weakness but it's also seeded in the bitterness of her own background where that's the central feeling that most people experience (Chapter 5, 33:08 in the audiobook).
The soul and society crushing reality of losing a skilled steel-making job and no longer having something that you're good at (Chapter 14, 06:16).
The idea that rich people view the world the same way as someone with brain damage--they don't understand the realities of life (Chapter 20, 18:55).

22 people found this helpful

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K A Byrne

Is this the first in a trilogy?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 8, 2021

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I come from Pennsylvania and the decimation of the steel industry there holds many parallels with the loss UK coal mining communities must have experienced here when the UK pits were closed. The use of a five character story line had potential and I was really anticipating finding out how it all ended for each of them and then it just...ended?

I don't mind a book that doesn't tie up every last detail, but to not tie up any of the character arcs just left me feeling that Meyer got bored, couldn't decide what he thought should happen next or was planning another book in a series. The non ending ending left me rather unsatisfied.

2 people found this helpful

Clark Morton

Difficult to like

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 22, 2022

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I've given this two stars because the author clearly feels strongly about social issues created by the decline of traditional heavy industries. Nonetheless, I'm afraid I found this book, though it's heart is in the right place, heavy going. Firstly, it has multiple narrators, which I always find slows the plot. Next, the publishers have chosen to use an incredibly small font..... Next, very few characters are likeable. Most are portrayed as being trapped by their circumstances, with very few life choices. What choices they have in life, they tend to get very wrong. It's a bit unremitting. I also struggled a lot with the writing style. I just found it a bit derivative, a little bit as though trying too hard for the 'great american novel'. Maybe that's a bit unfair. In any case, there were an awful lot of very short and even one word sentences. Difficult. Challenging. Probably not intended to be an easy read. Successful.

hfffoman

Masterful (no spoilers)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 25, 2017

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I won't reveal anything except to say that it is the tale of several interconnected lives declining amidst the decline of the steel mills. The chapters alternate between the perspective of five of the main characters (plus a brief appearance of the sixth).

If you read The Son, this is very different but equally good.I found the entire book utterly convincing. He seems to have a masterful understanding of the way people think and act.

He breaks the rules of prose, blurring sentences together to approximate the way that people's thoughts run into each other. I don't normally like this kind of device but here it seems to work well.

The author's anger at the the decline of US heavy industry, and the treatment of the workers, is obvious but it does not spoil the book by preaching or trying to hard to make a point.

5 people found this helpful

Miss Shirley J Moore

An excellent read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 4, 2020

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I'm still reading this book and really enjoying it. The tale is of real people and describes situations in life that cause a knock on effect to those around them, the lives of human beings that overlap one another's sometimes with disasterous effects. The descriptions of the corrosion of Industrial America and the American Dream for the characters is visual and palpable, and gives us recognizable evidence of the changing times and loss of values.
The book arrived within a few days of my ordering it and in perfect condition. I will pass this book onto friends to read and I shall look at other of Philipp Meyer's books.

One person found this helpful

Nora Walters

Another America

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 9, 2013

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I loved this book. I have lived all my life in South Yorkshire, England and recognise the social/political/industrial background. I had never heard of the Rust Belt in America, but it is so like my area that it's characters and what happens to them could almost be transposed, with the possible exception of aspects of the police and legal systems. Given time I daresay those will move here too!
Philipp Meyer is new to me and bought on a recommendation from Amazon on the grounds that I have read several Cormack McCarthy books. I have now read two Meyers - 'American Rust' and 'The Son'. I liked both very much. I am not sure that it does either McCarthy or Meyer any favours to compare them too closely. Yes, they have certain interests in common, I think (American history, the difficulties of being men) but their styles differ. McCormack is much more poetic and much less accessible. Meyer seems to me to have more concern with plotting (interweaving, resolving) whilst McCormack's use of language (or should I say languageS) is wonderful but uncompromising. Philipp Meyer can write women!
I would recommend 'American Rust' to some friends. I love it but do not think it would be universally popular.

8 people found this helpful

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American Rust: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle) Paperback – January 12, 2010

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Buy new:

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FREE delivery: Monday, April 3 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

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