By Philipp Meyer
Spiegel and Grau, 2009
Reviewed by Sherry Lee Linkon

Reviewed by Sherry Lee Linkon

Deindustrialization is not a short-term condition. Consider the example of my city, Youngstown, Ohio. The steel and auto industries shaped this community, defining the landscape, local culture, and the city’s identity. Mill closings and downsizing in the auto industry have had an equally powerful impact, creating a landscape of decay and erasure, a culture of self-defeat, and a reputation as the poster child for deindustrialization. Youngstown’s story has become America’s story, and journalists and scholars keep asking what the rest of the country, indeed, the rest of the world, can learn from Youngstown. Perhaps the most important lesson is this: we can’t just get over our history. Our past makes us who we are, and that is as true for young people who were born long after the steel mills closed as it was for their parents and grandparents.

If you want to understand the long-term effects of factory closings, an emerging genre of novels—what I call “deindustrialization lit”—is a good place to begin. Writers such as Tawni O’Dell (Back Roads, Coal Run, Sister Mine), Shauna Seliy (When We Get There), Dean Bakapoulos (Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon), and Christopher Barzak (One for Sorrow) explore the experiences of the children of former coal miners, autoworkers, and steelworkers in regions that have been decimated by plant closings. In most of these novels, family dysfunction and individual psychological struggles intertwine with economic limitations and decaying landscapes, illustrating the ways in which deindustrialization is at once personal, social, and economic. Philipp Meyer’s American Rust follows the same pattern, tracing the physical, economic, and emotional tolls of deindustrialization on two families long after the mills closed.

Set in Buell, a fictional town modeled after the many small steel and coal towns in the hills surrounding Pittsburgh, the novel captures the landscape of deindustrialization in vivid descriptions of abandoned, crumbling industrial structures, places where, after years of disuse, nature is reclaiming the land with weeds and mud. An old steel car factory is described as “half-collapsed, bricks and wood beams piled on top of the old forges and hydraulic presses, moss and vines growing everywhere” (pp. 9-10). Meyer highlights the struggling commercial landscape in town as well, where a few businesses remain open—small medical facilities, a gun shop, a drugstore; but many have closed—“Montgomery Ward, the closed pharmacy, the closed Supper Club, the closed McDonald’s” (p. 61).

Meyer captures the landscape of deindustrialization in vivid descriptions of abandoned, crumbling industrial structures. 

While Meyer describes the place vividly, his characters don’t seem to feel much connection to it. The narration moves among six characters, but almost nothing they see evokes a positive memory. The one exception—police chief Bud Harris’s contentment with the hilltop cabin in which he lives outside of town—emphasizes the disconnection from place that shapes many of the characters’ lives. Harris’s log cabin reflects nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, as well as separation from the community. So much for solidarity.

The story centers around the experiences of two young men, a few years out of high school, both of whom have stayed in Buell almost out of inertia. Billy Poe had been a high school football star, and he turned down both college athletic scholarships and job offers from local football fans. He worked for a while at a local hardware store, but ever since he was laid off he doesn’t do much except hang around with his friend and former tutor, Isaac English. Despite Isaac’s intelligence—and the offer of assistance from a friend of his sister’s to help him get into Yale—he, too, has stayed in Buell, ostensibly to care for his father, Henry, who was partially paralyzed in an accident in the steel mill. Neither Poe nor Isaac likes being in Buell, and both feel ambivalence toward the family members with whom they live; yet both struggle to find a path out. Poe is repeating his mother’s pattern. Grace chose to stay in Buell when she was offered the opportunity to take a state job in Pittsburgh and, like her son, she regularly wonders why she didn’t pursue that chance. For Isaac, a complex mix of guilt, confusion, and uncertainty keeps him immobilized.

The only character who has left Buell is Isaac’s sister, Lee, who went to Yale on a scholarship, married a wealthy classmate, and is preparing to start law school. She feels guilty for dumping the care of her father on Isaac, and she has returned home to hire a private home health aide so that her brother can go to college. Like the other characters, she feels little connection with her hometown.

The only character who has left Buell is Isaac’s sister, Lee, who went to Yale on a scholarship, married a wealthy classmate, and is preparing to start law school. She feels guilty for dumping the care of her father on Isaac, and she has returned home to hire a private home health aide so that her brother can go to college. Like the other characters, she feels little connection with her hometown.

Meyer makes clear why everyone would want to leave Buell, painting it in unrelentingly grim hues. Rust Belt readers will recognize the landscape presented here, but they may also notice what’s missing: the webs of human connection and community memory that tie many local residents to struggling towns even when it isn’t in their economic interest to stay. One scene of Grace meeting friends for a drink hints at the human quality of life that, for many, compensates for the difficult economic conditions in places like Buell. Henry English must rely on his son to care for him, but in a real steel town, the family would probably have a dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins nearby to help care for an injured man. People stay in such communities because they value those connections, or simply because they appreciate the safety of the familiar. But that sense of community is absent here.

The story follows the characters’ responses to an adventure gone wrong. Isaac has stolen $4,000 from his father and is preparing to hop a railroad car and head west, pursuing an unrealistic dream of landing in Berkeley and going to work at a physics research institute. He has asked Poe to come with him to catch the train and, on the way,they stop into an abandoned factory building to warm up. There, they have a run-in with three homeless men, one of whom grabs hold of Poe and threatens to kill him. Isaac throws a large ball bearing, killing one of the men and allowing Poe to escape. But Poe leaves his jacket behind, and he becomes a suspect in the killing.

American Rust shows how deindustrialization affects not only those who lose their jobs, but also their children, who have been taught to expect failure. 

Poe is arrested and he refuses to tell the real story, in part in order to protect Isaac, but also out of a sense of defeat. His life is going nowhere, so why bother to defend himself? While he awaits trial, he is sent to prison, where his efforts to ingratiate himself with a white gang (that seems to offer protection) ultimately lead to more trouble. Meanwhile, Isaac finally takes off, walking, riding rails, and hitchhiking to Michigan, getting beaten up and robbed along the way but discovering both the extent and the limitations of his own self-sufficiency. For Grace and Lee, Poe’s arrest and Isaac’s departure raise new questions about their own futures, though neither makes any move toward change. The only character who seems capable of taking productive action is Harris, but his only option will protect Poe—and thus Grace, his lover—at the risk of his own career. That his actions seem inconsistent with his character makes them even more problematic.

Meyer seems unsure of how to end the novel. On the one hand, no one’s choices seem to matter much. Isaac decides, for vague reasons, to return home, though Meyer does not make clear what he will return to. Grace seems willing to sacrifice Harris to protect Poe, though the fates of both her lover and her son are left undetermined. Little seems to have changed. Ultimately, American Rust makes clear the limited choices, as well as the self-inflicted harms, of people whose lives have been shaped by deindustrialization.

The novel is flawed by a number of improbabilities and minor internal contradictions that prove distracting. For example, Meyer introduces but never develops the story of Lee and Isaac’s mother, an assimilated, educated Mexican immigrant. She is mentioned twice in the entire novel, with little elaboration. Her Latina background seems to have had no effect at all on their lives, something that is hard to imagine in a small Pennsylvania steel town.

Meyer misses a similar opportunity in the story of Lee’s escape from Buell. When she journeys into the elite world of the Ivy League, she hides her background and finds her peers occasionally irritating; but she also chooses—with little apparent struggle or self-doubt—to cast her lot with the elite. For many working-class young people, the acts of leaving home and joining the middle-class (much less marrying into an upper-class family, as Lee does) create guilt, confusion, and a sense of displacement. Lee feels some ambivalence, but that is mostly about having left her family behind, not about fitting into her new world.

American Rust shows how deindustrialization affects not only those who lose their jobs, but also their children, who have been taught to expect failure. Despite its flaws, this novel—and others like it—makes the experience of growing up in the Rust Belt visible and personal. As communities around the country collapse in the face of foreclosures and job losses, these novels warn us of the long-term consequences of the current economic crisis.

New Labor Forum 19(1): 102-116, Winter 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.191.0000016