Finally! A New Novel I Can Love

As my four regular readers can attest, I do not have much good to say about the contemporary novelists held in high regard by literary critics and prize juries. As a rule, I don't trust the taste of book critics. Too many have joined the Cult of the Sentence, deeming that fiction best that piles up the most standout sentences, imagery and “lyrical” language, the accumulated weight of which apparently makes a novel literature with a capital L. It's been a long time since I picked up a book from the New Fiction shelf at the bookstore, read the first page and walked to the register with it. The triumph of style over story in modern literary fiction leaves me cold, bitter and buying classics.

Then I read a couple of reviews of American Rust. (Yes, I still do read reviews, even the New York Times Book Review, hoping against all evidence for change, going back again and again like an abused spouse.) The only thing in the reviews that got me looking for the novel was the subject matter: the effect of industrial collapse on American workers. Being from a long line of working class rednecks, I decided to give another new author a chance based on that alone.

And I'm glad I did. Philipp Meyer has produced a book that, by the end, had me comparing his novel to Richard Wright's Native Son and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Like them, he masterfully weaves into the story the socioeconomic and political pressures that bear on the lives of his characters without preaching, without beating us over the head with a morality tale. Yet you can't come away from it without knowing in your bones the corrosive effects of industrial decline on the lives of his working class characters. He has deep sympathy for all of his characters, the “good” and the “bad.” Each character has their own trajectory, and Meyer makes it inseparable from the collision that sent them on their way.

While Meyer does have one stylistic quirk I found annoying—he sometimes drops commas and periods that interrupt the natural flow of his sentences—for the most part the writing is straight forward, lacking the self-conscious poetic flourishes so much a part of contemporary literary writing. His prose serves the story rather than call attention to the author.

Buy American Rust. Don't take it out of the library. The author deserves the royalty, and I don't say that about many authors these days. I look forward to more from Philipp Meyer.

Fear and Work

What if I don't make it as a writer? That is the terrifying question that pops into my head every morning I don't write, every time I intend to work on my second novel and find a way to avoid it. I check my e-mail with a deep undercurrent of dread, knowing that I'm checking it for the fifth time in the hope that there will be something to which I must respond, so I might duck the writing I should be doing. I check my friends' blogs to see if they wrote anything of interest, rationalizing away my need to tell the story I set out to tell. I will be sure to get a lot done on it tomorrow. I just have to think about the characters a little more. That's actually part of the writing process, isn't it? And another day of writing disappears into a past from which it cannot be retrieved. And at some point during that day, the question that freezes my guts makes it's way up from the chilly depths of my personal hell: If I'm not a writer, what am I?

Thirty years ago, my possibilities were endless. I was smart and strong and healthy and capable. I had a future to fill with nearly anything I chose. So I chose to dabble in nearly everything, never mastering anything. I squandered opportunities, spit on good luck and assumed there would always be a second or third or tenth chance. I attended and quit college so many times I can't recall each instance, but I never did finish a degree. I moved from job to job to job without ever holding one for two full years. I expanded the breadth of my experience to the horizons without ever going deeper than the grass at my feet. If for nothing else, it was ideal preparation for writing fiction. But what if I don't use it to write and succeed as a writer?

I'm fifty-two, single, and broke, having accumulated none of the limited wealth that even the lowliest laborer expects by this age. My joints are trashed from years of manual labor and a passion for the slow demolition of the human frame that is sports. I can scrape by suffering through days of construction and handyman work for another decade or so, but to what end? The end? I cannot simply make a living anymore. If I have amassed nothing else in this world, I have accrued expectations of myself that I cannot shake. Having lost much, I am still a smart guy with some writing talent and broad experience to draw upon. I can use that to write and, if I work hard at it, write well.

I hope I am not too lazy to do that. Recent evidence leads me to believe it sometimes. Long and hard work can lift the less talented. Sloth and procrastination have bedeviled the talented and left them anonymous since we started scratching on cave walls. I think it is fear that keeps me from working hard, however. In the past, I have thought that passion dispels sloth. Perhaps I was wrong. I am passionate about writing, about fiction, about storytelling in any form. Do I fit the classical mold of Talented But Lazy? Maybe. But I think its more about being scared to find out I don't have the Talent part of that equation. Which leaves me back at the beginning: If I'm not a writer, what am I? And here is where I merge with the fears of every person who has ever been born or ever will be born. I fear that if I am not a writer, my life will not have mattered at all. If I cannot become an accomplished writer, I will fade to insignificance without ever having the compensations of love or wealth. I will die having been nothing special at all.

Can a guy have a deeper motivation to write than that?! I have been reading John Steinbeck's letters to his editor during the process of writing East of Eden. The man who had previously written Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath was scared he wasn't up to the task. He admitted to his hope that writing a novel would get easier with each success and his realization that this was a false hope. It is never easy or effortless. But he put his head down and marched forward anyway. For which we can all be thankful. So I suppose I will put my shoulder into it and work. Work and hope. But as has been said by many before me, I must never hope more than I work. I have to trust that work will dissipate my fear.