The Getaway
The novel opens in the middle of an attempted theft. Not just any theft, mind you, but incestuous embezzlement of a father’s life savings by a son taking the opportunity to hit the road and seek out an escape from a dead-end town with no prospects. The lack of opportunities in that town will serve as a foundational backbone for the economics which informs the action. It is an attempted escape from fate as much as it is an attempted run for destiny:
“Soon he reached the overlook: green rolling hills, a muddy winding river, an expanse of forest unbroken except for the town of Buell and its steelmill. The mill itself had been like a small city, but they had closed it in 1987, partially dismantled it ten years later; it now stood like an ancient ruin, its buildings grown over with bittersweet vine, devil's tear thumb, and tree of heaven. The footprints of deer and coyotes crisscrossed the grounds; there was only the occasional human squatter.”
Foreboding
Imagery is put to especially effective use in creating a sense of foreboding just before the story takes a terrible turn. It hasn’t been made exactly clear what the appearance of three obviously bad dudes is going to lead to, but nothing points to things turning out good. Just before things begin going really bad, however, the imagery ramps up the menace:
“It was nearly dark and the storm had broken temporarily, though more clouds were coming in—across the meadow he could see the trees swaying by the river. He wondered again how he'd get Poe to come out. Thinks it's still school. No consequences. As for the field, it was full of scrap metal, tall grass grown up around piles of train parts, huge engine blocks, wheels, driveshafts and gears. A handful of bats were cutting and darting over the piles of rusted steel. There was a patch of high clouds in the bloodorange light and he watched until the sun faded completely. He didn't know whether to go back and get Poe or if Poe would come out on his own.”
Well, We’re Living Here in Allentown
The Billy Joel song “Allentown” offers a glimpse of the backstory which is at work in this narrative. Unfortunately, Allentown could be replaced with any number of cities across the rust belt and the fictional town in this tale fits the lyrics quite nicely. The names and faces change, but the song remains the same:
“Things had been lean. They had waited and waited for the mills to reopen. But the mills just kept laying people off, all up and down the Valley, and then they were closing, and Grace had a young child and that was the end of school for her. There was not a single job to be had. Not two nickels to rub together. Meanwhile Virgil's cousin, who had nine and a half years in the mill and big payments, a nice house with an inground swimming pool, he'd lost his house, his wife, and his daughter on the same day. The bank changed the locks and his wife took the daughter to Houston and Virgil's cousin broke into his own house and shot himself in the kitchen.”
More Than Jobs
The loss of employment is forwarded as something that runs far deeper than a mere paycheck. It is not just about collecting the paycheck and being able to buy what you need and even what you want. The loss of a good job doing something that seems to actually matter runs so much deeper and it is what defines not just a person, but an entire town or region:
“There's only so good you can be about pushing a mop or emptying a bedpan. We're trending backwards as a nation, probably for the first time in history, and it's not the kids with the green hair and the bones through their noses. Personally I don't care for it, but those things are inevitable. The real problem is the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at. You lose that, you lose the country.”
Philosophical Reflections in Solitary Confinement
One of the characters winds up in jail. And while in jail he winds up in solitary confinement. Or, as it is commonly known: the hole. And the hole can enact a philosophical flight of fancy toward pure imagery that makes everything else seem merely like struggling for monosyllabic expressions of simple reptilian need:
“The truth was people died every minute. Were dying. The only real miracle was the human perception that it would not be him. But it would be. It was the only certainty. It was back to the darkness, a cycle. It was back to the darkness, a cycle, a comfort. There was no point to the putting off. It was a spiral of shame, shame of being wrong, of being wrong that you were the source of all existence, when really, when you were born, you were the same as a name on a gravestone. A gravestone of the future. A born destiny.”
