American salvage : stories

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Hardcover, 2010

Status

Available

Publication

Detroit, Mich. : Wayne State University Press, 2010.

Description

American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Bonnie Jo Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

User reviews

LibraryThing member brenzi
In American Salvage, National Book Award finalist Bonnie Jo Campbell sought to portray the lives of America’s working poor in her native Michigan and the timeliness of this story collection is striking. With unemployment still hovering at around 10%, and with Michigan unemployment near 15%,
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Campbell highlights the unemployed and the underemployed, the down and out, and the practically there, but in doing so she portrays working class characters that don’t give up even with the odds stacked against them and, in the end, she allows them to let hope emerge. Things may seem hopeless here, but these characters prove that just the opposite is true.

Each story shows, through its quirky characters and desperate circumstances, the strong character traits needed to survive in the yawning depths of economic disaster. Impossible to put down, each story had me laughing until the circumstances changed on a dime and I was near tears. The settings of each story are littered with rusted cars, camouflage clothes, missing teeth, lack of insurance, methamphetamine, whiskey bottles, busted-up marriages and, just for good measure, the author throws in a large dose of plain old bad luck.

In “The Burn” down and out character Jim Lobretto is having what can only be described as a Murphy’s Law kind of day. He picks up a girl at the bowling alley and offers to drive her home only to learn as they pull out of the parking lot that she still lives with her parents twenty miles out of town. On his way back, he stops for gas but only has $3 for gas, $3 for cigarettes and $1 for coffee. In getting the coffee, he drops the cup and splatters coffee all over himself and the woman ahead of him in line. Out at the gas pump, he overfills his tank and gas runs down his right thigh and knee. Back on the road again, he gets pulled over for going through a stop light. As he’s waiting for the policeman, he tries to light a cigarette but the match ignites his pants where the gas spilled. The dialogue up to this point is hysterical but the foreboding language leads you to know something bad is coming down the pike, and the comedy of errors is going to end pretty badly. Campbell skillfully transitions to the painful ending to the story.

Along the way, Campbell throws out more than a few gems:

“It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic—love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men wanted to focus on just one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.” (Page 34, “World of Gas”)

And from “King Cole’s American Salvage,” Page 129:

“Johnny went back to work and started scrapping out a Lincoln Town Car. King was watching him, and it made Johnny conscious of his own breath forming a cloud that hung around him, a cloud that kept him down here on the oily, hard-packed dirt of the salvage yard, down here wearing his greasy clothes, picking through the piles of engines and axles with his filthy hands, down in this neighborhood of ramshackle houses with dogs barking in the torn up yards.”

You know you’re in the hands of a master here and she delivers. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member nancyewhite
Absolutely amazing. These stories of folks living on the lower rungs of the ladder in rural Michigan are full of emotional and literary knock-out punches. Although many of the people populating these stories are physically and emotionally scarred, they all feel genuinely real and knowable.
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Depicting the dark clouds of poverty, pain, abuse and addiction most of the stories also have a glimmer of a silver lining - hope, love, comfort, connection. Campbell is particularly adept at describing the dark places that love can take us. Unbelievable. I hope that being a National Book Award finalist gets Bonnie Jo Campbell out of obscurity and into the literary limelight she deserves. I could hug the person who brought this book to my attention.
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LibraryThing member msf59
While reading this remarkable collection of stories, I thought of shopping for fresh fruit. How, when making your selection, you choose the healthiest, most robust piece, overlooking the mottled, unhealthy ones. The discards. This describes the people in these tales, with their bruised and damaged
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lives, living on the fringes, in this case rural or small town Michigan. Ex-cons, drug-dealers, struggling families and survivalists, to name a few. Campbell is an exceptional writer, with a fine ear for the rhythms of everyday life. She does not condemn or judge these characters, but gives them an honest, unflinching, sometimes heart-rending examination. Highly recommended!
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LibraryThing member richardderus
Solid craftsmanship, a fearless imagination, and a complete lack of corrosive, cynical piety and pity make this collection of short stories exceptionally enjoyable.

I share nothing with these characters except the right to trial by jury, and yet I was enrapt by them. I loved "The Solutions to
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Brian's Problem" the best, since I never expect to see a male PoV on abuse by women. This book is seething with the rage of characters whose lives turned out bad, as in the TV series "Breaking Bad," and are flat-out irredeemably broken. This same territory was trodden by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed from the factual PoV...it was revolting to read that book, it hurt me in ways I can't recover from, but Bonnie Jo Campbell has brought home to me the true emotional cost of indifference.

I don't thank her for that.

But I do recommend the book highly.
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LibraryThing member lisapeet
Really good writing, brings to mind a female, slightly more contemporary take on Breece D'J Pancake's territory. Dark stuff -- the characters are all injured in one way or another -- but very well done. It's all classic and not show-offy in the least. The last story, "Boar Taint," called to mind
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Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf," though with an upbeat ending -- probably the most optimistic story in the collection. Now I'm really sorry it didn't win the NBA.
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LibraryThing member TimBazzett
The writing here is first class. Campbell is probably one of the few writers today who can portray so accurately the lives of the unemployed, the disheartened and broken-hearted, the redneck and uneducated - in short people who are down on their luck or who've never had a chance for a decent life.
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There are drug addicts and drunks here, child molesters and rape victims, junk dealers and dirt farmers, and they are all so real you'd swear you might have met them somewhere. Perhaps the most recurrent theme in this slim volume of stories is one of near hopelessness. I guess if I'm gonna be honest here, the only real reason I didn't give this book five stars is because the stories are just too damn depressing. But they say you should write about what you know, and Campbell obviously knows her subjects, these awful characters who live along the margins of our society, in this case in southwest Michigan, where most of the blue collar factory jobs have long gone south. Home cooked meth is the drug of choice here and things in general seem pretty bleak. One wonders what Bonnie Jo Campbell sees in these people or why she chooses to write about them. There are clues to this scattered here and there, however, as in the title story's last line. A junk yard employee who was nearly an accessory to murder is stripping catalytic converters off old cars and throwing them on a pile - "mostly they were dirty and rusted from the slush and the mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of platinum."

Campbell has lived among these people. Hell, probably many of them are friends of hers. And she sees value in these beaten down people consigned to the junkyards of American society. She knows God doesn't make junk. She looks for the core, for the valuable, for the soul. She looks for the salvageable. This will be a hard sell to recommend. The subject is just too blatantly bleak. But this woman can write!
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LibraryThing member porch_reader
I've read two of Bonnie Jo Campbell's novels ([Once Upon a River] and [Q Road]) and loved them both. But with this collection of short stories, her talent and range are even more evident. The stories are set in Campbell's home state of Michigan, and they provide stark snapshots of criminals and
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meth addicts, of struggling farmers and washing machine repairmen, of people whose stories usually go untold. The details in these stories will stick with me. The young girl, a victim of sexual assault, aiming her shotgun at the tip of her uncle's penis. The brains seeping from the head of a junkyard owner who was robbed and fell into the snow. The smell of the boar, purchased for $25, on his last legs because the former owners had tried (and failed) to castrate him. These stories were not easy to read, but they made me admire the way that Campbell paints a picture and took me into worlds much different than my own. But even more than these details, I was impressed by the tender and sometimes surprising emotions that the characters exhibited toward one another. Against all odds, there were glimmers of hope, of empathy, of joy, and of love. An excellent collections of stories.
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LibraryThing member Stbalbach
American Salvage is "Northern Gothic", Flannery O'Connor transported to rural MI with Finns and Germans and snow and mud (and no religion). Although only 166 pages, the stories are dense with atmosphere and character, and like the best fiction, it leaves a deep impression of a place and people.
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Most of the characters are on the surface grotesque, discarded bodies in a salvage yard, but underneath there is a "core of platinum" ("King Cole's American Salvage") - survivors in the rough that continue living despite disabilities. Physically injured men, addiction, sexual abuse and emotionally scarred women figure prominent in these stories - it's unpleasant to look; but Campbell usually leaves a bit of light at the end, something to keep us going, too. I look forward to reading more by this wonderful author.
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LibraryThing member librarianbryan
This was narrated by Recorded Books “in house troupe” and I don’t know if that is good or bad. Does this troupe perform all of Recorded Books books now? Or maybe this was just a way not pay all the narrators? I’m not sure but it just seemed shady, but before every story the particular
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reader is named so that is good.Sorry I’m addicted to audiobooks and I’m now obsessed with giving kudos to the readers.As to the stories themselves, they are some fine working class “realist” fiction with a feminist bent. What’s not to like? So they are up my alley, but I require a little more from the language. Anything that can be so neatly pigeon is a little too easy for me, which is funny because I’m pretty most sure people thought these stories were hardcore-Dorothy-Alison-of-the-North-type sh*t. I guess I’m desensitized.Still, the line “I’ve been burned! Badly burned!” has been stuck in my head for weeks. I can’t wait to read Once Upon a River.
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LibraryThing member 3RiversLibrary
In American Salvage, National Book Award Finalist and Michigan native, Bonnie Jo Campbell introduces an array of characters that have one common goal: survival. Joblessness, meth addiction, abuse and desperation; the themes illustrate struggle and demise of the working class in rural America.
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Campbell’s graphic details and raw imagery combine, submerging the reader into her literary prose. These stories are unique, vivid and relatable. Bonnie Jo Campbell succeeds in bringing to life the not-so-glamorous aspects of our Michigan culture, yet leaves the reader hopeful that even the most damaged of beings can be rescued. Reviewed by Becky, Three Rivers Public Library.
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LibraryThing member thronm
There is something wrong with this set of stories and it's not the setting, the intention to sorrid detail or the characters themselves. The attempts at "hope" or "honor"--even respect--are bits and pieces that are overwhelmed by the bathos and lost characters. In the title story, the catylitic
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converter ripped from the Olds is tossed on a heap with others, each with a touch of platinum in it--its touch of value. That's a symbolic trick that is not a way to redeam these characters, this town, these stories. Yet, we don't leave these characters or settings after we close the book--they linger in the mind and heart, ignoble as they are. Skip the clever short story tricks and look at the dirt and pain. Flannery O'Connor of Michigan it is not.
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LibraryThing member TexasBookLover
American Salvage, a product of the Made in Michigan Writers Series at Wayne State University Press Detroit, is a collection of fourteen short stories written by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Each of these stories is set in down-and-out rural Michigan. Most of the characters are damaged by poverty. Some of
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these families are laboring under poverty so exhaustive that it seemingly offers no hope for a better life. Simple things can be a crisis for these families: the gas bill, dinner, school shoes for a child. These things rise to the level of crisis because the characters cannot conceive of the long term because the short term necessarily commands all of their effort and attention. For the most part this is all they have ever known. They believe that they are doing all they can but not gaining any ground. Consequently, they fall into a belief that they are at the mercy of "others," whether it be the family, the boss or the government (Y2K!) They feel powerless against these forces.

This is best illustrated by a young girl from The Inventor. "She has long imagined her future spreading out before her, gloriously full of love and discovery; she has been waiting for the future to arrive like a plate full of fancy appetizers in a restaurant, like a lush bunch of roses placed in her arms, like the biggest birthday cake with the brightest candles, baked and lit by people who love her." This is a response and an accommodation of poverty; not imagining she could go out and create a future for herself, difficult as it would surely be.

My two favorite things:

This is my favorite quote from the collection: "It landed with a resounding clang on the pile of catalytic converters- mostly they were dirty and rusted from the slush and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of platinum." This is from King Cole's American Salvage. The character in this scene performs back-breaking labor outside in all types of weather, for little money, in an auto salvage yard, but he has plans and determination and resolve to make a better life for himself. This may sound odd to compare human potential to a catalytic converter but I take the quote as a metaphor. Some of us don't look like much on the outside but there's a valuable core of promise.

My favorite character is Jill from Boar Taint. She has discovered a way of coping with her economic circumstances. She indulges herself by buying gourmet chocolate bars one at a time. She keeps them in her underwear drawer and breaks off one square each night until the bar is gone. Then she goes out and buys another. This small act says that Jill still believes she is valuable; that she does indeed have a core of platinum.

American Salvage has won an impressive number of awards: 2010 Michigan Notable Awards, 2010 National Book Critic Circle Book Award, Stuart and Venice Gross Award for Excellence in Literature from SVSU, 2009 National Book Award Finalist, and the 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year Award. If you are a fan of realist American regionalism (as I am) and a fan of short stories (ditto) then you may find many things to like in this collection. However, if you are not a fan of these genres then you should probably pass by American Salvage. It is not for the faint of heart.

And remember that love does not conquer meth!!
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LibraryThing member snash
This collection of short stories portrays the lives of the poor, struggling underbelly of American life with compassion but honestly. Some stories, particularly "The Yard Man" stick with me.
LibraryThing member hemlokgang
A good collection of short stories. Their central theme seemed to be that life is tough, but if we would just take the time we would find poignancy and meaning where we do not see it at first.
LibraryThing member ben_h
Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage contains experiments with form, such as "The Solutions to Brian's Problem", but it's the setting that ties all these stories together: the vast stretches of rural America--small one-industry towns, blighted landscapes, poor and desperate people. Campbell
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skillfully ratchets up the emotional intensity: the intense pain of a serious burn slides into the ecstasy of sex which climbs into Catholic passion; blood features prominently throughout, as does asphalt, and alcohol. Few of these stories have resolution; most often, something is immanent--either action or reaction remains to be resolved just beyond the margins of the text. When there is resolution, it is tentative and provisional. A crack is patched, an excuse found, a life or relationship will hold together for a while longer, perhaps. Most of Campbell's characters have their private sorrows, which define them more clearly than their circumscribed social lives. It's gripping reading, but there's something suspect in the ease with which the reader is drawn into Campbell's world. Race is rarely mentioned, but these stories seem to be about white people's lives; a strange choice when race is so large an issue in rural America. And the characters, no matter how distasteful or unlikeable on the surface, are revealed to be complex and fascinating people. Campbell has taken the much-maligned rural American (the farmer, the factory worker) and rehabilitated--or perhaps redeemed--him. In these stories, he suffers, he yearns, he holds out work-scarred hands, gazes out of wise eyes, and invites the reader to share his sorrow and pain. Campbell has given this cast of characters, so often denigrated or overlooked in the story of America, a voice--but would their real-world counterparts recognize it? In any case, readers who hear that voice will likely find it both moving and memorable.
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LibraryThing member Carlie
These short stories left me feeling a bit eerie and melancholy, as I suppose they were intended to do. The characters are poor and troubled, living on the outskirts of mainstream society. Some are caretakers, some are farmers, and some are criminals, but all of them have a desperate way about them.
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They have heartaches and problems that I hope to never face.

Most of the stories feature men as the main characters. A recurring theme concerns their relationships with women – these men all seem to be pained by their women while also placing them on pedestals and working so hard to please them. They can’t quite seem to succeed despite all of their efforts. Campbell excels in expressing the raw feelings these despondent and forlorn characters experience.
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LibraryThing member bettyandboo
American Salvage is a collection of 14 short stories that was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. All of the stories are set in Michigan, near Kalamazoo or towns close by. (In her acknowledgements, Bonnie Jo Campbell writes "the events and characters depicted in these pages are fictional,
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but my hometown of Comstock, Michigan, where many of these stories could have taken place, is very real.")

These are people more than down-on-their-luck; they have, in many cases, been victims of abuse or other crimes. They are meth addicts and alcoholics. In many cases, they are (or were) hard-working and unable to rise above their circumstances, either because of personal fallibles or those of the people in their lives. They're not all that easy to like, and their stories aren't easy ones to listen to.

I think they are important stories, difficult as they are, because these are the stories of so many people on the edges and fringes of society. These are the stories of the people whom we interact with and encounter in our daily life. While they might not be identical to those of the people and stories in American Salvage, and their circumstances might be different, there are more people in these types of situations than I think many of us realize (or want to realize). And with the way the economy is going, there will be more people in these circumstances.

Because of the importance of these stories, I really wished that I liked this collection much more than I did. Still, the characters seemed to blend into each other from one story to another, and at times I honestly had to check and see if I wasn't repeating myself listening to a story I'd already heard. Several also ended abruptly; I was listening to this on audio and at times thought something went amiss with the CD.

That's not to say that there aren't a few gems in this collection. I loved "World of Gas" and "Fuel for the Millennium," which both have the doomsday Y2K preparations as their theme. (They also seem connected.) In "World of Gas," I really enjoyed the character of Susan and could visualize her so easily because Campbell did a wonderful job of making her character so authentic and vivid.

Another story worth mentioning is "The Solutions to Brian's Problem," which is the matter of Brian's wife being a meth addict and the ravages of her addiction on himself and their child. The entire story is not even four pages long, but it is one of the most poignantly written ones included in American Salvage and an example of tight, precise, high-impact writing.

I listened to the audio version of American Salvage and appreciated that there were four different narrators, which alternated from each story. That made it easy for me to readily identify where I was when I hadn't been listening for awhile. At times, there did seem to be slightly longer than usual pauses between sentences, but that only occurred on a few stories and was a characteristic of one narrator as opposed to a consistent issue throughout the production.
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LibraryThing member Illiniguy71
A book of excellent short stories, subtile yet hard-hitting. These stories concern poor whites in the small-town and rural Midwest. We have tens of millions of these people in America, but their existence is hardly even acknowledged in our time. The stories reveal what difficult lives they often
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lead, but our country tries to pretend they do not exist or that they themselves should be blamed for their disagreeable, often desperate, circumstances. As we grow ever-more oriented to the wants, desires and ideology of the rich, these peoples' lives become ever worse. Kudus to Bonnie Jo Campbell for giving us such a readable and sympathetic description of them.
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LibraryThing member Hebephrene
I'm surprised this got a National Book award nomination because there is nothing outstanding about it. It's well written, if a little conservative. And the tales are unremittingly grim. I think only two stories Stormy Weather and Boar Taint offer any form of redemption. Most are close third but if
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there is anything that deserves our attention it is the way she approaches the idea of story since most are more like gloomy slices of a hopeless life, with the last two paragraphs offering a summary. There is no possibility of change or epiphany, recognition won't ease anyone's circumstances so the best we can hope for is a mild shift in perspective. And in that sense they are very modern and very true since they represent a very cohesive world view of Michigan. The first story is the most interesting in that it risks more in terms of structure and approach but again, it is only this bleak continuance of one's life that is noteworthy. The violence is non sensational and no different from the other kind of violence going on.
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LibraryThing member zmagic69
A group of short stories that all take place in Michigan. I am sure there are people, maybe a lot of them living this way and they sure don't make you want to live in Michigan. The stories for the most part are about people and ways of life that stopped progressing after the 1970's. Except the wide
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open use of Meth. The problem with nearly all of the stories, is there is no conclusion to them, they just end. This is fine for a couple of stories but not every one of them.
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LibraryThing member Sovranty
This collection of short stories was purposeless and less than entertaining. Not a single story had a lesson or point of view that could somehow teach you something, about yourself or the characters. While it seems like the stories should be life-like or based on true events, not a single one seems
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believable.
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LibraryThing member datrappert
Every story in this brilliant collection is alive and real. The characters, with all their problems, hopes, and sadness will speak to you no matter who you are. Existence is day-to-day here, as I guess it is for most Americans, and Campbell writes with an insight and clarity that is beautiful and
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rare. Most impressive are the relationships she depicts between men and women, but the setting and details of each story are also precise and perfect. You owe it to yourself to read this one.
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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50
American Salvage is a collection of short stories by author Bonnie Jo Campbell. She writes about rural, working class people of Michigan, people who once thought they could attain the American Dream but have long since given up and become the broken, damaged and discontented who can’t see beyond
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the downward spiral that their life has taken.

Although this was not a comfortable read, the author writes stories that are detailed, heart-felt and peopled with characters that feel authentic and real. This is an author who knows how to explore the lives of the desperate and drug-addicted and in doing so, reaches into the heart of America with some painful truths about what life is like for those who found themselves falling short.

As with all short story collections, I found some of these stories resonated a little more strongly with me than others, but overall the depth and richness of her writing, the poignant and painful lives she reveals, and the eye-opening rust belt mentality she describes make American Salvage a riveting and unique read.
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LibraryThing member Narshkite
It is relevant to note, as I have before in GR, that I grew up in Michigan and my mother told me that after the first time she took me to NYC when I was three my only response to the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a New Yorker. I was a pretty self-actualized 3-year-old. My
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parents refused to pay for an out-of-state college (which I totally understand, when I went to Michigan State tuition was $71.50 a credit hour) so I left MI after college graduation -- 3 days after to be precise. But still, I feel an attachment to my home state for many reasons, despite never (ever!) again wanting to live there. MI has spectacular natural beauty (especially the west side of the state with Lake Michigan and Lake Superior showing off a whole lot of perfection) and also IMO a fascinating if brutal history, excellent spare ribs, Sander's hot fudge cream puffs, the stunning Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and a really good zoo. Also, Michigan has a surprising number of really great writers to its credit. Most of those writers are from Michigan but some remained and others left and returned. Bonnie Jo Campbell is one of that last group. For a long time she was a Chicago writer from rural southwestern MI, but for reasons that honestly baffle me she returned to Michigan where she lives rather close to another writer who will be on my best of the year list this year, Diane Seuss. My bafflement at Campbell's return does not stem entirely from me projecting my feelings about living there. Mostly it is baffling because Campbell writes about living in rural southwestern Michigan, and it sounds really truly awful.

The people we meet in this brilliant collection are uniformly unhappy. Most everyone is an alcoholic or addicted to meth and/or is the intimate partner or child of an addict or alcoholic, Many experience relentless suicidal ideation. Almost all are poor, some living in shocking want. Everyone here struggles to maintain any meaningful relationships, and even if those exist all appear to feel profoundly lonely much of the time (the exception is the last story, Boar Taint, in which the MC just seems like a searcher in a difficult but satisfying life passage.) The loneliness is what broke me. This book is filled with really bad people, Michigan Militia wannabes, and a few good people who cannot seem to win against the onslaught of bad. With every character though, even the murderers and rapists it is impossible to hate them.

There are touches of humor to be found here, but they are rare and more rueful than rollicking. Mostly though this is humbling and sad and so true. These are not caricatures of want at all, every character is fully drawn. When I first started this several months ago I noticed one of the top GR tags that had been applied to it was "Southern" and I laughed. I know geography education in America is terrible, but the only way Michigan is southern is if you live in Canada -- in fact, there are parts of Canada that are south of parts of Michigan. But then I realized that this reads a lot like Southern literature focused on poor White rural communities. I can hear in these stories writers like Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, and even a hint or two of Faulkner. That is not to say that this is derivative, it is not, but stylistically this feels more a part of Southern lit than of Midwestern lit.

I am on a roll lately with good books after a bit of a slump -- this is going to be my top short story collection for sure, and I expect it will make the top 10 fiction choices. Campbell is a writer I have been meaning to read for years, and I think it is likely I will be moving Mothers Tell Your Daughters and Heart Like a River way up in the batting order after reading this one.
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Awards

National Book Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2009)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2009)
Paterson Fiction Prize (Finalist — 2010)

Language

Barcode

11338
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