Still, it was a quaint town: neat rows of white houses wrapping the hillside, church steeples and cobblestone streets, the tall silver domes of an Orthodox cathedral. A place that had recently been well- off, its downtown full of historic stone buildings, mostly boarded now. On certain blocks there was still a pretense of keeping the trash picked up, but others had been abandoned completely. Buell, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Fayette-nam, as it was often called.
This novel is about the way that hopes and dreams can quietly be murdered far away from the eyes of those who do not even know their futures are being snuffed out. America in the information age—America as a consumer economy rather than a production economy—is not the same thing it used to be in those days of company towns where successive generations knew they had a legacy waiting for them. That legacy was enough to murder dreams in its own way, but the destruction of dreams today is different. We won’t know how it this transformation is all going to play out for quite some time, of course, and so for the time being American tragedies must look backward to how the entire towns—entire regions—were slowly suffocated as a result of that very transition. Such a tale is this one.
He looked at their trailer, his mother had not wanted to buy it but there was a lot of land and his father had wanted the land. Somehow he won that one, but then they split up and his mother was stuck with the trailer in the boonies. His mother, who talked about moving to Philadelphia, who'd done several semesters at college. Who used to roll out of bed looking good but now goes shopping in dirty old sweatpants and her hair tangled up.
For many born into company towns where you were expected to go straight from school into the company business—or leave school early if possible—college is the dream of a way out. Even before it became evident that the reliability of those companies was not everything it had long been thought to be, there were those who grew up who wanted to get out and whose dreams were crushed by expectations of kin. Why bother with college when there was a perfectly good job waiting for you with a pension at the end? College is not for everybody, of course, and there is something both distinctly American and distinctly unfair that those with the least use for college—student athletes—are those with the greatest chance of getting there from towns like the one portrayed here. But, of course, even that avenue was denied to women. Chances are there have millions of women born into towns like this one who had a semester or two of college under their elastic waistband. It is certainly not an idiosyncratic part of the history of the rust belt.
Underneath the other scrap—he reached his hand carefully through the stack of rusted metal to where a dozen or so industrial ball bearings were scattered in the dirt. He picked one up. It was the size of a baseball, or larger, cold and very heavy. Maybe too heavy. He wondered if there was something else. No, there's no time.
If there is one thing that is not in short supply across the rust belt it is ball bearings. If cotton was king of the farm belt in the 20th century and corn is king of the farm belt in the 21st century, then bear bearings reigns supreme on the throne of the rust belt. To a very great extent, America attained its supremacy as the dominant global power in the 20th century on the smooth glide of the ball bearing. As a result, this most simplistic of machine design is plentiful throughout great portions of this country and though not explicitly invented for the purpose, they make for a particularly powerful weapon. That the plot takes a menacing twist due to the plentitude of ball bearings and their majestically fatal potential when used as a weapon is one of the most brilliant decisions made by the author.
