I enjoyed reading this book...mostly. That's quite a compliment from someone who never reads the 'crime' genre. I am also self-obsessed enough that I don't usually read any book where I can't imagine that I could realistically be one of the characters.

I suppose that's partly why this book is good: that the characters do seem like ordinary people who happen to have fallen into extra-ordinary situations. Thus I could feel that I could easily have (and still could) ended up as one of these characters, though some quirk of fate. "There, but for the grace of god, go I", is a feeling a had a lot as I read this novel.

Where I failed to relate to the story was in the fact that most of the main characters turned out to be highly virtuous in their own way. They stuck by their principles despite the personal pain and suffering. That's not me and it's not my experience of most other people. Even the only clear wrong doer, the Police Chief, did wrong for what might been considered the 'right' reasons.

Because this book was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers Giveaway, there's lots of reviews by Americans. They'll have a lot to say about the representation of the decaying American industrial landscape and society. That's one crucial aspect of the book and I've said nothing about it...I suggest you go on and read a proper review. ( )

If you never read another book you need to read this one. Best book I've read in a long time. I had to put it down once in a while just to catch my breath! ( )

Isaac English and Billy Poe are sons of Buell, an increasingly destitute mill town in the Monongahela Valley of western Pennsylvania. As disparate as brain and jock can be, they are, amazingly, best friends. Isaac wants out of the dying steel belt so badly that he steals his father’s $4000 emergency fund. Poe, in love with the beauty of the rolling hills and river bottoms reverting from manufacturing powerhouse to wilderness, is trying to scrape out a living so he can stay. On what begins as a last walk to the rail yard, the young men encounter a group of bums. Before the day is over, one of the homeless men in dead. The rest of the novel explores the consequences of an act of violence born out of friendship.
Much in Meyer’s debut novel, as in life, defies appearances and expectations. Chapters, written in the distinctive voices of the characters -- the boys, Poe’s mother Grace, Isaac’s sister Lee, and the town police chief Bud Harris -- reveal glimpses of their personalities, family histories, and underlying motivations. The story also paints a dreary landscape of the social realities and prospects of post-industrial America. Throughout, it is a compelling, atmospheric journey of the dogged hope, abiding friendship, unspoken love, family loyalty, terrible mistakes, and personal sacrifice which emerge when the American dream goes bust. ( )

Although the pace was a little slow in the beginning, the tension soon escalated and I was hooked. The characters were exceptionally well-developed. An excellent read. I look forward to this author's next work. ( )

"He would not shoot a coyote. They were noble animals is why. They had a will -- they made other animals take them into consideration. Mountain lions, wolves, it was all the same. You could not kill an animal like that unless you were very sure of your motives."

"American Rust" is to what's left of 21st Century steel towns what American Beauty was to upper middle-class suburbia. A crushingly sad novel about a decaying and dying community in Western Pennsylvania. Not a single character exhibits a modicum of the nobility Sheriff Harris ascribes to the coyotes that have migrated into the hills near his home.

Henry English, widower of a suicide and crippled by a workplace accident idolizes his daughter for her intelligence and her acceptance to Yale and Harvard but loathes his son Isaac who may be more brilliant than his sister Lee.

Yet Isaac refuses to leave his father's side seeking some form of approval that will never come at the cost of all opportunities for college and leaving his desolate hometown. And when Isaac does decide to escape, he robs his father of savings to run away to Berkeley by riding the rails like a depression era hobo. College admissions offices do love larceny in their students, so good plan on Isaac's part.

[SPOILER OF OPENING CHAPTER] Isaac's initial attempt to leave town sets a tragic and pathetic course of events into motion by convincing Billy Poe to come along to an abandoned warehouse the night before he would hop the rails on his misguided faux-romantic trip west. Poe is a bored man-child seething with strength and violence. A former home town football hero who squandered his own opportunities to go to college and escape Buell, his best days are behind him. Unable to walk away from a confrontation with squatters, Poe nearly gets killed and, ironically, it is the scrawny Isaac who kills one of the hobos.

Even Lee the girl who "got away" to Yale and Harvard Law School is trapped by the gravity of Buell coming back to care for her father only to find that her brother will need a lawyer to help him avoid homicide charges. Lee's marriage to Simon is a loveless one to an idle, rich boy buried in his own depression and engaged in juvenile yet dangerous alcohol-soaked antics with an entourage of hangers-on. His friendships mirror the friendship between Isaac and Poe.

If life is the struggle of Sisyphus, pushing a boulder endlessly up a hill, "American Rust" is a novel about what happens when your foot slips in the dirt and the boulder comes rolling down and over you. It's a powerful and affecting read UNTIL the all too pat and sudden ending. Worth the read but first-time novelist Philipp Meyer ties up all the plot threads in the last 20 or so pages. No one is particularly happy with how he or she comes out at the end, but it just didn't feel as if the inevitable dooms headed their way actually destroyed any of them.

3/5 stars. Well-written but blows it in the end. ( )