American Rust by Philpp Meyer

 

This was a really blunt and kinda obvious novel, all about Rust Belt despair and depression and all the other bad things that were coming in 2007 or so when this novel was written. There's no real hope for any of the characters in it, anything they do might be the one thing to kick the legs out of their present and demolish their future. Which doesn't seem all that horrific, they mostly aren't people one is inclined to root for whole-heartedly--though in many instances the reasons they're not particularly likeable are clear. Mostly, none of them has the mental bandwidth to spare, to make any good decision that isn't basically an accident. The prose mostly feels ... muffled, I think; there are elements of something like a style, all comma splices and occasionally (intentionally) dodgy grammar, but there's a sense of remove, a failure to connect to (or with, whatever) the characters. Whatever electricity there might be does not convey through the language to the reader, aside from the occasional nifty turn of phrase. The multiple POVs are plausibly necessary to get across all the story (or stories, I guess) Meyer wants to get across, but they seemed to diffuse the novel's focus more than a little. It was not a total waste of my evening, but it wasn't a great read, either.