"Setting aside literature & "important" non-fiction for PURE FUN. Nearly 1100 pages--hope it goes by in big chunks."
]]>
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]>
]]>
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
]]>
]]>
"He would not shoot a coyote. They were noble animals is why. They had a will -- they made other animals take them into consideration. Mountain lions, wolves, it was all the same. You could not kill an animal like that unless you were very sure of your motives."
"American Rust" is to what's left of 21st Century steel towns what American Beauty was to upper middle-class suburbia. A crushingly sad novel about a decaying and dying community in Western Pennsylvania. Not a single character exhibits a modicum of the nobility Sheriff Harris ascribes to the coyotes that have migrated into the hills near his home.
Henry English, widower of a suicide and crippled by a workplace accident idolizes his daughter for her intelligence and her acceptance to Yale and Harvard but loathes his son Isaac who may be more brilliant than his sister Lee.
Yet Isaac refuses to leave his father's side seeking some form of approval that will never come at the cost of all opportunities for college and leaving his desolate hometown. And when Isaac does decide to escape, he robs his father of savings to run away to Berkeley by riding the rails like a depression era hobo. College admissions offices do love larceny in their students, so good plan on Isaac's part.
[SPOILER OF OPENING CHAPTER:] Isaac's initial attempt to leave town sets a tragic and pathetic course of events into motion by convincing Billy Poe to come along to an abandoned warehouse the night before he would hop the rails on his misguided faux-romantic trip west. Poe is a bored man-child seething with strength and violence. A former home town football hero who squandered his own opportunities to go to college and escape Buell, his best days are behind him. Unable to walk away from a confrontation with squatters, Poe nearly gets killed and, ironically, it is the scrawny Isaac who kills one of the hobos.
Even Lee the girl who "got away" to Yale and Harvard Law School is trapped by the gravity of Buell coming back to care for her father only to find that her brother will need a lawyer to help him avoid homicide charges. Lee's marriage to Simon is a loveless one to an idle, rich boy buried in his own depression and engaged in juvenile yet dangerous alcohol-soaked antics with an entourage of hangers-on. His friendships mirror the friendship between Isaac and Poe.
If life is the struggle of Sisyphus, pushing a boulder endlessly up a hill, "American Rust" is a novel about what happens when your foot slips in the dirt and the boulder comes rolling down and over you. It's a powerful and affecting read UNTIL the all too pat and sudden ending. Worth the read but first-time novelist Philipp Meyer ties up all the plot threads in the last 20 or so pages altogether too neatly and much too quickly. No one is particularly happy with how he or she comes out at the end, but it just didn't feel as if the inevitable dooms headed their way actually destroyed any of them.
3/5 stars. Well-written but blows it in the end. ]]>
]]>
]]>