American Rust
A Novel
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
NOW A HIT STREAMING SERIES • A “bold, absorbing novel” (The New York Times Book Review) of the lost American dream, the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love that arise from its loss, and two young men, bound to their hometown, who crave an escape.
“Powerful . . . gripping . . . in the tradition that stretches from Ernest Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy.”—The Washington Post
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Economist, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Newsweek, Kansas City Star, Idaho Statesman
Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother dies by suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown, a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.
Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his unrelentingly downbeat debut, Meyer offers up a character-driven near-noir set in Buell, a dying Pennsylvania steel town, where aimless friends Billy Poe and Isaac English are trapped by economic and personal circumstance. Just before their halfhearted escape to California, Isaac accidentally kills a transient who tries to rob Poe. The boys return to the crime scene the next day with plans to cover up the crime, setting the plot in motion. Poe is soon under suspicion, and Isaac, distraught after discovering Poe has been carrying on a relationship with Isaac's sister, Lee, sets off for California alone. Meanwhile, Poe's mother, Grace, mourns her own lost opportunities, broods over her son and pines for her on-again-off-again love, the local sheriff. A fully realized tragic heroine, Grace is the poignant thrust of the novel, embodying enough rural tragedy to nearly atone for the novel's weakness: a sense that some of the plot mechanics are arbitrary. Still, Meyer has a thrilling eye for failed dreams and writes uncommonly tense scenes of violence, and in the character of Grace creates a woeful heroine. Fans of Cormac McCarthy or Dennis Lehane will find in Meyer an author worth watching.
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