AMERICAN RUST by Philipp Meyer (Pocket Books, 2010)
Philipp Meyer is routinely likened to the blood and dust writers like Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy but the Baltimore-based author actually cites his own influences as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and James Kelman.
A point of connection between these British authors is that they all like to get inside the heads of their characters and that’s just what Meyer seeks to do in his debut novel. The story may begin like a state of the nation saga but evolves into a series of psychological portraits criss-crossing between two generations.
The two protagonists are men in their early 20s – Isaac English and Billy Poe. Isaac is academically gifted while Poe is a talented American football player. Their lives should be full of promise but are blighted by their own aimlessness and, more significantly, by a botched act of self-defence which gets treated as first degree murder. Poe takes the fall for the ‘crime’ while Isaac refuses to be swayed from hitting the road in some Kerouac style fantasy of being the “Duke of all hoboes”. Continue reading
For the first part of this novel I was sure I was going to give it a maximum five-star rating. By the end I wondered if four stars was too generous.
