American Rust: A Novel

“Yes he thought this is what girls must feel like when a stranger puts hands on them. Not a feeling that goes away in a hurry.”

Poe experiences the trauma of sexual assault at the hands of two drifters in an abandoned machine shop. Now, freezing in the bushes outside his trailer, he thinks about what might have been if it wasn’t for his friend’s rescue. Poe, who has slept with his share of women in high school and beyond, has never given much thought to what women experience at the hands of aggressive men. He now considers both the emotional pain of the moment and the lasting effects in the long term.

“The human race—they despised anyone they thought was better than them.”

Poe, two years out of high school, is no longer the king of the hill, and he notes with bitterness the fickleness of the locals. Once a beloved football star but now unemployed and with no direction, he is on the receiving end of the town’s schadenfreude, that particular delight people take in watching someone else’s misfortune . It’s a tough lesson for Poe, that he is, in fact, no better than any other unemployed, driftless youth. It is, however, the basis for his friendship with Isaac, the brainy kid with a bright future who still counts Poe as a friend.

“No more after that—they didn’t understand your projects. You knew they wouldn’t but you went ahead anyway. Quarks and leptons, string theory, and then you learned your lesson. Half of them think the earth is four thousand years old.”

Isaac, far ahead of his peers academically, is restless. His mind needs to be nurtured in a more stimulating environment. In his rural environment, academics play second fiddle to other priorities, like jobs, sports, and religion. This quotation suggests that the town’s creationists and proponents of intelligent design hold sway over biology and geology, and the more scientifically-minded Isaac naturally feels isolated and misunderstood.

“There were certain places and certain people who mattered a lot more than others. Not a single dime was being spent to rebuild Buell.”

Grace’s thoughts voice a common complaint from Middle Americans who feel slighted and ignored by coastal elites. In the aftermath of 9/11, an entire nation grieved for New York City and rallied with solidarity. When whole industries move overseas and leave hundreds of thousands of people—in Middle America—unemployed, the reaction, Grace notes, is a shrug. While nonprofits raised millions to rebuild Ground Zero, the mills and processing plants in Mon Valley remain shuttered, rusting in the mud.

“There were old boxcars in the field and a peaceful, pleasant air about the place. Nature assimilating man’s work. In his much younger years, he had seen things like it in Vietnam, abandoned temples in the jungle.”

As Harris and Steve Ho surveil the machine shop, waiting for the perpetrators to return, Harris notes the tranquility of the scene and the inevitability of nature’s encroachment. Harris is stoic about these developments, seeing nature as logically facilitating the decline in industrial civilization. The character’s comparison of the shop to Vietnamese temples implies that industry and commerce are, in many respects, the American religion.

“Christ, he thought, what happened, a second ago you were happy.”

Poe, enjoying a beer with Lee, suddenly thinks about classmates who have been killed in military service. His thoughts quickly turn to revenge against those responsible, and, in an instant, his mood sours. One thought inevitably leads to another, they spin out of control, and before he knows it, he goes from happy to dour. Meyer’s use of inner monologue allows his readers to follow this thought progression as it happens; Poe’s abrupt realization that he’s no longer happy may be a shock to him, but readers see it happening in real time.

“Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard—you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else.”

Lee justifies her leaving for Yale and her marriage to Simon by telling herself that Simon’s money can pay for Henry’s caretaker. The process may be a long one, but it will be worth it in the end, or so she tries to assure herself. Using the metaphor of a lifeguard, she convinces herself that leaving Isaac behind and marrying into a wealthy family were all necessary to reach the desired outcome. As she later realizes, however, her reasoning is a convenient lie. She fled Buell in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s indigency, not out of some long-term plan but because she simply couldn’t handle it.

“Poe was a boy from the Valley, Poe loved the Valley, Poe had not read a book since graduating from high school.”

Lee, torn between her marriage and her love for Poe, weighs the pros and cons. While Simon is wealthy and educated, Poe is of the land, a hiker and a hunter, a purely physical being. Her common sense argues that someone who hasn’t read a book in two years could never satisfy her intellectually, but her heart doesn’t care. They don’t discuss Proust while they make love. The animal attraction exists, and she can’t deny it.

“Right now, right from where he was sitting, there were patches of woods that he remembered being overgrown fields when he was younger. Oak, cherry, birch, the land going back to its natural state.”

Poe witnesses the trees creeping back, reasserting themselves, taking back lost territory. The theme of nature versus industry runs throughout American Rust, and Poe, too young to remember the mill closures and the layoffs, doesn’t see this new development as a bad thing. In his mind, the land was never meant to support massive factories with their polluting smokestacks and industrial waste. That kind of progress is not “natural” (almost by definition) in the way that nature is.

“As for Daryl hanging around the white supremacists, it was not unusual. Stormfront they called themselves. They’d come in when the mills went under and Pennsylvania was now full of them.”

Isaac’s encounter with a white supremacist carries a nonchalant tone, but economic privation breeds extremism. Meyer traces a direct line between the decline of the economy and the rise in groups like Stormfront. When people feel that institutions have failed them, they are more likely to channel their anger and hopelessness into like-minded communities, even if those communities advocate hatred and violence. Hitler’s rise to power and his vilification of the Jews came in the wake of Germany’s economic inflation and rampant unemployment after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

“He didn’t see how the country could survive like this in the long run; a stable society required stable jobs, there wasn’t anything more to it than that.”

Harris, for all of his questionable ethics, has a keen eye for the socio-economic roots of problems like crime and drug addiction. He sees law-breakers not as morally wicked but as victims of an economic system that doesn’t value them. People want to work, he reasons; they don’t want to steal or live off government assistance, but social conditions create moral ambiguity. If theft is required to feed one’s family—or oneself—the choice becomes far less black and white.

“Nothing mankind was capable of, the worst of human nature, it would never linger long enough to matter, any river or mountain could show you that—filthy them up, cut down all the trees, still they healed themselves, even trees outlived us, stones would survive the end of the earth.”

Once again, Harris takes the long view. Observing the destructive effects of decades of steel and coal production, he reassures himself that, in the long run, humanity cannot destroy the planet. The earth will cleanse and repair itself, and humans will become extinct long before the earth sustains any lasting damage. It’s an unusual perspective considering that, in the short term, most Buell residents can only see rust and decay.

Once you lost your dignity, that was it. Dignity was life.”

In the midst of Poe’s incarceration and her regrets over her responsibility in his behavioral problems, Grace resolves to “keep her chin up” (155). Her resolve echoes the simple desire of all of Buell’s residents, indeed, of many working-class people caught under the grinding wheels of Darwinian capitalism. The ability to provide for herself is important to Grace’s sense of dignity.

“All the things you needed to know in life—you didn’t learn them until you’d already made your decisions. For better and worse you were shaped by the people around you.”

A recurring theme in the novel is regret over past choices—although, even given the chance to reflect, it’s likely that these characters would repeat those choices. Grace acknowledges as much when she thinks about the circumstances that brought her here, to a double-wide trailer on an expanse of overgrown land, working her arthritic fingers to the bone. It’s a fatalistic sentiment. Given the circumstances of her youth—pressured into a factory job, pregnant during the layoffs—Grace was left with very few options.

“Somewhere there were barons of prisons as there had once been barons of steel.”

Life in Fayetteville is cheap and disposable. The food is barely nutritious, the physical structure is yellow and stained with age. Poe is witnessing the aftereffects of prison privatization, a system driven by the same laws of capitalism that dominate the market—profit at all costs, even if it means substandard treatment of those in its care. The same relentless profit motive that put Henry in a wheelchair and decimated the economy of an entire region of the United States has found its way into the prison industry.

“The real problem is the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at. You lose that, you lose the country.”

As Harris and Glen Patacki sip beers and wax philosophical aboard Patacki’s boat, the conversation turns to the state of the nation. Patacki is not optimistic. “We’re trending backwards as a nation, probably for the first time in history” (212). The problem, as he sees it, is lack of pride in one’s job. While there are other things to live for beside punching a clock, part of the American identity lies in productivity and self-sufficiency. With that gone and former middle-class workers reduced to minimum-wage jobs, part of that identity has been stripped away. When that happens, Patacki argues, people lose faith in national institutions, and social cohesion inevitably begins to fray.

“And Isaac had gotten them into just that situation and had then wanted to get up and disappear. But Poe was not like that. It was a thing called self-respect and he possessed it and Isaac did not.”

Alone in his prison cell, Poe vacillates between blaming himself for his fate and blaming Isaac. Trying to rationalize why he didn’t just walk out of the machine shop with Isaac, he decides that walking away would have shown a lack of dignity—a value he learned from Grace, perhaps. He does not see retreat as sensible but cowardly. Isaac, he reasons, is responsible for putting them in the situation in the first place but then being too cowardly to resolve it with honor. Poe feels he is the hero, the innocent victim rotting in a jail cell while Isaac roams free. Poe’s ruminations result partly from his hopelessness and isolation.

“Passing through the town, past the old police station and the new one, he’d seen the Fall, the shuttering of the mills, and the Great Migration that followed. Migration to nowhere—thousands of people moved to Texas, tens of thousands, probably, hoping for jobs on oil rigs, but there weren’t many of those jobs to be had. So those people had ended up worse off than they started, broke and jobless in a place they didn’t know anyone.”

The displaced workers of American Rust, like the refugees from the Dust Bowl in the mid-1930s, are willing to relocate if it means better jobs. Like the Okies heading to California, however, steel workers heading to Texas find the economic reality doesn’t live up to the promise. To make matters worse, they are now separated from their families and support networks or, like Henry English, forced to choose between a paycheck and dangerous working conditions.

“This is what it feels like to be crazy. Simple things don’t make sense.”

As Isaac scrounges for food and shelter, battling the cold without a coat or warm clothing, his mind reels. He imagines himself offering to rent the backseat of a stranger’s car and then wonders at his own harried thinking. Isaac mistakes desperation for mental illness. In fact, the extremes he is forced to consider make perfect sense given his circumstances.

“It was just like the field, a bunch of big guys wanting to knock the shit out of you, it was your choice. Wolf or sheep, if you didn’t choose it was chosen for you. Hunter or hunted, predator or prey, everyone knew it was the ancient relationship.”

Poe wants to be a martyr to Isaac’s cause, protecting his smaller, bookish friend who would “be a snack for these people” (270). Even the strong and athletic Poe, however, is out of his element. Surrounded by career prisoners adept at the rules of this deadly game, Poe can only rely on his instincts and his brawn. He compares prison to a football game or, more accurately, to the cutthroat animal world. This is the kind of calculus Poe can wrap his mind around—predator/prey, wolf/sheep, simple binaries. He’s made these distinctions his whole life, but rarely have the stakes been as high as they are now.

“Earth is made of bones. From wood and back to wood and you’ll never know what came before you.”

Age and hard times have made Henry philosophical. Surveying the abandoned and rotting homes around his property, he imagines himself rotting right alongside them. Taking the long view, Henry sees his death not as an isolated, tragic event but as a small part of a natural cycle, one that will continue long after his body has been reclaimed by the earth.

“You could not have a country, not this big, that didn’t make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.”

Poe thinks about his past job prospects and how so much of the current job market centers around dismantling the old mills and factories, a new industry rising from the ashes of an old one. Poe doesn’t need more than a high-school education to see the consequences of shipping so much manufacturing overseas; in fact, Poe has more foresight than the corporate CEOs who shuttered their own factories and shipped them abroad. 

“Letting go of your knife while he robs you of everything, instead you grab his coat, then chase him down the street. What would you have done if you’d caught him—used your powers of rhetoric?”

Penniless and cold, Isaac begins to realize how ill-equipped he is to survive in the wild. Poe understands what it takes—a me-against-them mentality—but Isaac only knows how to survive the world of academia. Surviving the elements requires action without equivocation, but Isaac cannot bring himself to use the only weapon he has, even in defense of his only resource, the money.