American Rust

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, a lush landscape as deceptively promising as the edifaces of the now empty steel mills that once provided the livelihood of generations, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation that arises from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them who dream of a future beyond the factories, abandoned homes, and and polluted river. Isaac is the town genius, a young man left behind to care for his paralyzed father after his mother's suicide and his sister's departure for Yale. On the day that he steals $6,000 from his old man's desk and sets off to make his way to California to study astrophysics, he and his sister's ex-boyfriend Poe, a former high school baseball star, are waylaid by a group of transients. Isaac's inadvertant murder of one of the men changes the friends' fates and tests the loyalties of their friendship and those of their lovers, families, and the town itself. 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 transcendance, and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.