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.