The beginning of the 2000s, the small town of Buell, the city-forming enterprise in which there was once a steel mill, is in a state of decline: the plant has closed, funding for municipal facilities is cut at times every year, there is no work, trailers are increasingly being replaced at home, which are cheaper to maintain. In an atmosphere of decay, rust and depression, two twenty-year-old guys live in Buell - Isaac English and Billy Pou: both of them showed hope in their school years, the townspeople believed that they would definitely be able to go to college and get out of here, but fate decided otherwise.
Pou, a former football star, has fun fighting and can't find a permanent job, Isaac takes care of his sick father and remembers those happy years when his mother and sister were around. One day Isaac decides to escape from Buell and calls Billy with him...
Depressnyak. If it were necessary to describe "American rust" in one word, I would choose that, but the second word would be "trap", and necessarily with the addition of "slammed". This hometown is for all its inhabitants, who together with the old workshops of the American "Rust Belt" are covered with rust, together with the old houses are falling apart and literally crumbling before their eyes, warming their arthritis with warm towels and seizing pain with analgesics.
Reading the first pages, I remembered the nineties, when absolutely everything was actively closed in our region, miners knocked with helmets, and my father, who worked at the factory, was not paid wages for nine months, but he still held on to this place, because you could get food, milk and pastries for coupons in the dining room, and this is better than nothing.
And by the end, I realized that in fact nothing has changed, the picture is still relevant to this day, except that you don't have to starve: in small towns, the regression of economic development is more noticeable, everywhere bright signs "rent", not removed for the last couple of years, queues for the opening of the labor exchange, which need to be occupied from five in the morning, and a terrible outflow of the population under forty, so sometimes you wonder with whom you will communicate in a few years if all your friends and acquaintances leave and leave.
Former single-industry towns, whose city-forming enterprises were ordered to live for a long time, are all over the earth, and no one knows what to do with them and their inhabitants: the industrial revolution has happened, but now it already seems something terribly distant, like the existence of dinosaurs on Earth.
Everything that was happening, the more into the woods, the more reminded me of McDonagh's "Three Billboards on the border of Ebbing, Missouri", only if in the film everything was brightened up by the grotesqueness in depicting situations and characters, an abundance of jokes, albeit sometimes quite harsh, then the book did not spare the reader. This is the same world of the American outback (from which, in fact, economic centers are just a stone's throw away): here is the police, whose chief will have to cut half of the staff due to lack of funding, here is a prosecutor who needs a death sentence to advance in the service.
Here is a woman who has spent her life on an unfaithful cheating husband and an equally unfaithful son, who in her fifties has to either ingratiate herself or brag for the sake of saving the life of an only child, and here is a handful of gossiping locals who sit in a bar half in the evening, and the second - they give themselves proteins, joking about the fact that they will soon die together with the town.
The American dream has not turned to everyone, it has rusted to a bright red color, and no matter how close the heroes were to it once, now it seems to be something unattainable. Another thing is that, unlike metal, the heroes of the novel are covered with rust only on the outside, and when Mayer begins to "poke" them, it turns out that inside they are still feeling, suffering, and desiring living people.
Recently, I have often come across works of fiction whose authors talk about the irresistibility and complete power of rock over a person, "American Rust" is also one of them: Isaac, Pou, Grace, Bud Harris, Lee and Henry English - they all do what their mind and heart tell them, but something from above. It would seem, why is the smartest guy Isaac half of the book a homeless, hungry tramp in dirty clothes and with an empty wallet?
Why does Sheriff Bud Harris, also a completely intelligent man, endowed with power, for the sake of a once passionately desired woman, commit such rash acts at first glance? But, unlike his fellow writers, Philip Mayer does not give an answer to the question of how a person can overcome this foregone conclusion, so the happy ending presented to the reader, which looks rather strange against the background of the entire previous text, is not: returning to such a life is a dubious reason for joy, even if you realize that there are worse lives.
365.675 SRY