Philipp Meyer’s powerful first novel, “American Rust,” scrapes beneath today’s economic headlines to show us a community corroded by poverty and despair. Told in language both plaintive and grand, it’s a tale of murder and the struggle for redemption in a Pennsylvania steel town that will never reclaim its old prosperity.
Everything about this story seems essentially American, but such is the strength of Meyer’s prose and, unfortunately, the prevalence of economic anxiety that it’s already been sold to publishers in a dozen other countries.
At the center of “American Rust” are two pensive, restless young men, unlikely friends who neglected to flee their dying town when they had the chance after high school.
Isaac English was a brilliant student, but his mother’s suicide and his father’s disability paralyzed him when he should have gone to college.
His hulking friend Billy Poe was offered a football scholarship, but he balked at doing what everybody thought he should, and now he’s living with his mom in a trailer, eating deer he kills in the woods and resisting the humiliation of applying at Wal-Mart.
A gripping opening scene sets the novel in motion toward ever-swelling tragedy. Isaac is running away from home with $4,000 he’s stolen from his father. He has a plan he half knows is ridiculous: to hitchhike to California and study astrophysics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
But before he gets far out of town, he runs into his buddy Billy, and the two of them take shelter from the rain in a half-collapsed factory.
When they’re confronted by three homeless men, Isaac wants to run, but Billy — who can never resist a fight — takes them on, and one of the men is killed. This death is full of moral ambiguity and complicated repercussions that Meyer explores through the rest of the novel.
Rather than go immediately to the police, the young men panic, making an incriminating situation far worse. Billy is arrested and held in a brutal state prison where the story’s most harrowing scenes take place.
He refuses to say anything that might exonerate himself at his friend’s expense.
Meanwhile, Isaac continues his trek to California, feeling guilty for abandoning his crippled father and his jailed friend.
Meyer’s tone is less polemic than John Steinbeck’s, but he’s working on the same broad scale, using the struggles of a few desperate people to portray the tragedy of life in a place that offers no employment and no chance for improvement.
In the most bracing terms, he has calculated a poor economy’s human cost. He couldn’t have known as he worked on this backwoods story that he’d be publishing it at such an alarmingly relevant moment.
FICTION
American Rust, by Philipp Meyer, $24.95
