AMERICAN RUST
by Philipp Meyer
Simon and Schuster, Paperback; 384 Pages
ISBN: 9781847373960
Price:£12.99

James Tanner

A surprising amount of art, for want of a better word, is entitled ‘American…’ To name but a few: in film, we have Grafitti and Gangster; in literature, Pastoral and Psycho; in music, both Girl and Woman (not to mention Pie). It is a cliché of sorts. Why? Well, “American” is a big word with many emotionally charged meanings, both for Americans and for the rest of the world. Like all big words, it can be used cheaply. It is easy to tack the national adjective in front of a noun and get a title which suggests profundity, or at least ambitiousness. Such titles imply a promise to re-imagine their subject through the lens of the States, or to explain something about terrible and beautiful America herself. Such is the nature of a cliché: in order for your use of it to be not a cliché, you have to come up with something meaningful.

Philipp Meyer has. The “rust” in his American Rust refers to the many related themes of stasis and decay which form its core. At the highest level, we have characters continually lamenting the decline of America and its dream: we have a country where “there are no jobs to be good at anymore”. Next we have the rust of individual people: whether in body, spirit or situation, everybody here is in their excruciatingly slow decline. Finally, just as Moby Dick at its barest really is a story about a man chasing a whale, there is actual American rust cropping up throughout the novel: the story is set amongst the skeletons of the dead steel industry that used to provide the a valley’s lifeblood. This omnipresent useless steel and its crumbling means of production are both a reminder and the ultimate cause of the afflictive abstract rust.

These connecting themes may sound just a little too neat, a fact of which Meyer is well aware. In an internal monologue, the sole educated character draws the real rust/abstract rust connection when returning to her Valley home only to castigate herself for its obviousness: “a thousand people must have thought that before.” However, the novel’s slow (at times crawling) pace, and generally believable characters, allow for an exploration on how these rusts affect different people and relationships in different ways. This provides a strong architecture on which to hang the plot.

The plot, in fact, is almost incidental to the book, which is one of the novel’s bigger weaknesses. So little actually happens that it is hard to summarize the book without spoiling it. In a nutshell, a savant-like boy, Isaac, decides to run away from the dying Valley. He and an underachieving jock friend, Poe, get into some serious trouble whilst saying their goodbyes, leaving one of them (and his mother, and her lover the sheriff) to deal with the consequences. Meanwhile Isaac’s sister returns to the Valley to try to make some sense of the practical and emotional messes she left behind when fleeing north to university. This is not a page-turning thriller, or a Thoman Pychon/David Foster Wallace energetic web of plotlines and digressions. At times it is frustrating how slowly anything happens, and how much time different characters spend complaining, reflecting and vacillating on the same few incidents, often entirely inside their own heads.

Such are the perils of the Faulknerian narrative style Meyer adopts. Like the southern master’s As I Lay Dying, as chapters change so too do narrators, the story told largely via their internal monologues which skip dizzyingly (but realistically) between the first, third and often even second person. It’s a difficult way to tell a story, and while it does create real characters rich in contradiction and imperfection, occasionally Meyer slips up. It is jarring when Poe, whom we know from his own thoughts to be a simple, uneducated young man, all of a sudden thinks to himself: “The truth was people died every minute. Were dying. The only real miracle was the human perception that it would not be him.” Most of the time, however, each character’s speech rings true.

Although the story is told as Faulkner might tell it, its content is pure Steinbeck (with a soupçon of Salinger in Isaac’s runaway and self-destructive hatred of perceived phoniness). American Rust is like a Grapes of Wrath in which the Joad family and their neighbours stay in Oklahoma as their lifeless farms gradually blow away. In Meyer’s book dust has become rust, but his storytelling ethos seems similar to Steinbeck’s, painting portraits of people suffering through a torturously slow crisis. At times he exhibits Steinbeck’s weaknesses as well: too often characters come up with nauseating simple-yet-deep reflections (“All the dead men in the world-they had once been alive.”), and there is the same questionable implicit assumption that all of everybody’s problems would disappear if only there were enough good jobs to be had.

These flaws, though, are flaws that come from ambition and earnestness, and are quite forgivable given the author’s bravery at tackling such difficult themes using such technically complex narration. This is all the more true given that this is a first novel. Not having done my homework, I had suspected that this was a semi-autobiographical work that the author had poured everything he knew into, a backwoods prodigy doomed to be mercurial à la John Kennedy Toole. Silly me: Meyer has been everything from a medical technician to a derivatives trader, living all over the States. This is no a roman à clef, culled from personal experience, exhausting the writer’s stock of material.

What it is is a promising and mature first novel, showing a clear knowledge of the American masters without coming off as too derivative of any one amongst them. Meyer has demonstrated a broadness of vision and a willingness to fully explore characters and their motives, albeit at some cost to pace and plot. His future work, which I look forward to reading, will, I hope, take similar chances on plot and narrative drive as he took here with theme and structure.