What I am Reading

Phillip Mayer’s new book, American Rust, shows us the lives of two young men who grew up in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town after the steel mills closed.  It’s a pretty good book, with some perspectives on how deindustrialization has affected people.  But I also think that Mayer’s novel is part of an emerging genre of fiction that focuses on life after shutdowns.  Tawni O’Dell has written three similar books, including Back Roads and Sister Mine, set in a Pennsylvania coal town.  O’Dell and Mayer both focus on not only on how people survive and struggle in communities without work but also on how family dysfunctions get passed on from one generation to the next.  That makes these novels difficult in some ways, but powerful, and it’s clear in the work of both writers that family problems are deeply rooted in economic struggle.