Philipp Meyer's powerful first novel, American Rust, scrapes beneath today's economic headlines to show us a community corroded by poverty and despair. Told in language both plaintive and grand, it's a tale of murder and the struggle for redemption in a Pennsylvania steel town that will never reclaim its old prosperity. Everything about this story seems essentially American, but such is the strength of Meyer's prose and, unfortunately, the prevalence of economic anxiety that it's already been sold to publishers in a dozen other countries.

At the center of American Rust are two pensive, restless young men, unlikely friends who neglected to flee their dying town when they had the chance after high school. Isaac English was a brilliant student, but his mother's suicide and his father's disability paralyzed him when he should have gone to college. His hulking friend Billy Poe was offered a football scholarship, but he balked at doing what everybody thought he should, and now he's living with his mom in a trailer, eating deer he kills in the woods and resisting the humiliation of applying at Wal-Mart. ... (Read the full review)

Philipp Meyer's debut novel, set in Buell, Pennsylvania, the heart of America's withering Rust Belt, could easily be a regular tale of life on the other side of the tracks. When the once-booming steel and coal industries collapsed, "half the people went on welfare and the other half went back to hunter-gathering". Buell has become the kind of place where kids cook up meth in their backyards and Wal-Mart is the only company hiring. Meyer's cast is equally familiar: Isaac England, a bright boy who should have gone to college but stayed to look after his disabled father; his sister, Lee, who has fled town for the Ivy League; his best friend, Billy Poe, the high-school football star who has become a violent, beer-swilling no-hoper; Poe's mother, Grace, who can't keep away from good-for-nothing men; and Bud, a cop with a good heart.

The story starts with Isaac setting off (like "Jack Kerouac junior") for California, only for him and Poe to become embroiled in an accidental murder a few miles outside of town - his attempt to break away, to "be a somebody", thwarted at the first turn. ... (Read the full review)

Philipp Meyer’s affecting first novel, American Rust, takes place in a small Pennsylvania steel town named Buell, a place where the jobs have disappeared, and foreclosures and meth use are on the rise, a town that makes longtime residents feel trapped and young people eager to flee, the sort of town profiled in newspaper and magazine articles about the fallout of the economic downturn on middle America and the tarnishing of the American Dream.

Mr. Meyer, whose writing has been published in McSweeney’s and The Iowa Review, conjures up this blue-collar Rust Belt town with the same sort of social detail and emotional verisimilitude that Richard Russo has brought to his depictions of upstate New York and Russell Banks has brought to downstate New Hampshire. He writes about his characters’ lives in Buell with sympathy and unsentimental clarity, conveying both the suffocating and supportive aspects of small-town life and his people’s disheartening sense that they have somehow wound up on the wrong side of history, sidelined in a forgotten industrial town in the shiny new information age of globalization. ... (Read the full review)

Popcorn Youth: Let’s talk about the book. It’s a terse, often chilling portrait of American life. There have been comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and even John Steinbeck. Do you take names like this into account as you’re writing, or does the style come from somewhere all its own?

Philipp Meyer: While I definitely appreciate Steinbeck and McCarthy, the writers I’m most conscious of learning from are Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf; also a Scottish writer named James Kelman. One of literature’s unique capabilities is that it can take you inside people’s minds and consciousness. That was my goal in American Rust.

I spent a lot of time studying the way people’s thoughts and speech patterns interact, and a lot of time studying the mechanics of my own thoughts—how quickly the mind moves from one topic to another, circles around and examines things from different angles. As for the writing style I think it’s just me, writing in the most honest and accurate way I can. ... (Read the full interview)