In the meantime, if you would like to submit a book review or write a guest post about Rust Belt fiction or Rust Belt culture, please feel free to email me at rustbeltreader [at] gmail [dot] com.

McClelland, Ted. The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008.

In The Third Coast, Chicago-based writer Ted McClelland embarks on a three-month circle tour of the Great Lakes in search of a common regional culture.

I’ve been wanting to read a book like this since I came across Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean in a bookstore in Glastonbury. Facing the Ocean posits that (archaeologically, at least) the people of the Atlantic coasts of Europe , from Ireland to Iberia, are more like each other than like their own inland countrymen. I suspected the same might be true for the people of the Great Lakes (I personally feel more in common with Buffalo and Detroit than with the rest of Ohio).

I won’t attempt to analyze McClelland’s entire book, but rather the three chapters where the Great Lakes meets the Rust Belt: Chapter 21, The Irony of Buffalo (including Buffalo and Erie, PA); Chapter 22, Ethnic Jazz (Cleveland); and Chapter 23, Black Bottom Blues (Detroit).

The Rust Belt subculture of the Great Lakes culture is summed up perfectly by McClelland’s companion on a boat trip down the Buffalo River, past the decaying remnants of long-forgotten industry:

“There’s few things that Buffalo has done perfectly. [But it has] perfectly separated the citizens from the waterfront.”

There is the same disconnect between the waterfront and the citizens in the next two waning industrial powerhouses McClelland visits. Although he acknowledges the Cuyahoga River’s role as a still-significant waterway, and in Detroit he visits the Mariners’ Church (not to mention the only floating post office in the U.S.), people in the Rust Belt don’t seem to embrace maritime culture in the same way as the fishermen and Boat Nerds of the Upper Great Lakes and Ontario. There isn’t anyone in the Rust Belt who seems to feel, as Ojibway chief Raymond Goodchild does, that there are “medicines in the water that belong to the people.”

Rather, Cleveland and Detroit are portrayed more as ethnic and “urban-eccentric.” McClelland nails Cleveland’s Rust Belt chic appeal:

This might be Cleveland’s moment…. In America’s hippest urban neighborhoods there’s nothing cooler than looking uncool. From coast to coast, alienated, countercultural twenty-three-year-olds have raided Cleveland’s closet for Penguin sport shirts, Jack Nicklaus golf pants, chunky glasses, and granny skirts…. They think bowling and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer make a great night out. Cleveland’s thrift stores and alleys could become major tourist attractions.

But, he adds:

Cleveland isn’t cool enough to pick up on that. Instead, it flogs the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Detroit is less Rust Belt Chic and more a poster-child for urban decay. McClelland visits the Heidelberg Project, which aims to revivify a declining neighborhood through unconventional public art installations. The neighborhood, judging by the map, has seen the business of a bulldozer lately – a typical strategy employed by shrinking cities to reconfigure their neighborhoods to suit half the population they were originally designed for. In the chapter, McClelland encounters a mess of feathers in one of these vacant lots. A neighbor tells him that a hawk swooped down, killed a pheasant, and ate it on the spot — a sure sign that nature was starting to reclaim a once-dense urban environment.

McClelland’s book, though far from exhaustive, accomplishes the next best thing: it shows Great Lakes people as they are, in all of their unique glory. It issues no judgment and draws few conclusions (other than if you attempt a circle tour of the Great Lakes you might return with a new-found love of hockey).

As far as I can tell, there is no similar travelogue for the entire Rust Belt region. But until there is, the canon of Rust Belt literature is far from complete.

“How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America” (The Atlantic, March 2010)

As I read this article, I kept thinking about how closely it described the overall mood in The Keepers of Truth. Particularly the conflict between jobless men and their wives, and the idea that women fare better in a lousy economy than men. The Rust Belt has long been flailing in the economic mire that the rest of the country is just now sinking into, so it’s possible that this Rust Belt-ization of America will act as a catalyst for the emergence of Rust Belt fiction as a genre, or that American literary fiction in general will start to resemble what Michael Collins was writing in 2001.

There’s also what Burgh Diaspora‘s Jim Russell calls a “Rust Belt Chic” in the air — a rough, offbeat quirkiness that perseveres despite the joblessness, poverty, and despair. He cites Anthony Bourdain, who last year shot a series of No Reservations episodes in the Rust Belt:

I think that troubled cities often tragically misinterpret what’s coolest about themselves. They scramble for cure-alls, something that will “attract business”, always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival. They miss their biggest, best and probably most marketable asset: their unique and slightly off-center character. Few people go to New Orleans because it’s a “normal” city — or a “perfect” or “safe” one. They go because it’s crazy, borderline dysfunctional, permissive, shabby, alcoholic and bat shit crazy — and because it looks like nowhere else. Cleveland is one of my favorite cities. I don’t arrive there with a smile on my face every time because of the Cleveland Philarmonic.

Robertson, Don. The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. New York: Harper

Nine-year-old Morris Bird III is a timid sort of boy with a precocious sense of right and wrong. After hearing his teacher describe the brave deeds of James A. Garfield, Morris makes up his mind to atone for all the lily-livered mistakes he’s made and earn himself some “selfresepect.” The best course of action, he decides, is to embark on an epic pedestrian journey to see his best friend, who just moved a whopping two miles away to the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood of Cleveland. As fate would have it, the day he chooses is October 20, 1944 — the day of the infamous East Ohio Gas Explosion. (Also see the Cleveland Memory Project photos of the explosion and aftermath.)

(Because I like looking at city maps, I’ve recreated approximately the walking route that Morris Bird III used. Point B is the epicenter of the Gas Explosion disaster.)

What interested me most about The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread was the portrait of two Cleveland neighborhoods — Hough and St. Clair-Superior — that took a huge beating in the postwar suburban flight epidemic (and which have never entirely recovered). This was a pre-Rust Belt era. Cleveland was a more densely populated place where people lived smaller, more localized lives, where they walked to the store and rode streetcars to work, a place where East 63 and St. Clair and East 91 and Hough were thought of as worlds apart, and not just to a child’s mind.

It’s tempting to dismiss The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread as a mere nostalgia piece. There are, in American literature, a lot of literary reminiscences about being a child during the 1940s. But such a distinction misses the point: the book is a tragic coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of one of the worst industrial accidents in American history, made doubly tragic by the fact that nine is awfully young to come of age. (After all, a grown man would not normally feel nostalgic about seeing his best pal incinerated right before his eyes.)

It’s also important to note that the book was first published shortly before a conflagration of a different kind — the Hough Riots, which took place in the neighborhood where Morris Bird III lived. As Mark Winegardner illustrates in Crooked River Burning, the Hough Riots were as good a symbol as any of Cleveland’s own loss of innocence.

Don Robertson earned the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1966 for The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. He wrote two additional books featuring Morris Bird III, The Sum and Total of Now and The Greatest Thing that Almost Happened. The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature presented Robertson with the Mark Twain Award in 1991.

Collins, Michael. The Keepers of Truth. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Bill, a reporter for the Daily Truth, has returned home to the once-thriving town in downstate Illinois where his grandfather, an immigrant who had escaped the crushing poverty of the Russian steppes, had singlehandedly built a now-defunct refrigerator manufacturing empire. Although Bill attempts to use his position to pontificate on the decline of the American Dream, he is expected to report exclusively on local bake-offs and high school sports rivalries.

His boss’s attitude shifts, however, when Old Man Lawton turns up murdered and all signs point to his son, Ronny, a body-building loose cannon who works as a short-order cook at Denny’s. Sensing this might be his last opportunity for a big scoop (before he sells out to the Big City Paper), Bill’s boss sends him out to cover the Ronny Lawton story. Which, of course, turns out to be similar to his own: Ronny Lawton is a man who feels trapped by the seeming inevitabilities of familial heritage, whose rapidly shrinking pool of career options leaves him floundering in the sort of defiant self-hatred that, as Bill might say, “usually gets taken out on kids in supermarkets and checkout lines.”

The question that preys most heavily on the reader’s mind, however, is not “who killed Ronny Lawton’s father?” but “why on Earth did Bill leave Chicago and move back to this awful place?” The answer is not because he failed at law school. Nor did Bill labor under any noble illusion of reversing the town’s hard luck and bringing it back to its glorious heyday.

The answer is more complicated. Although Bill hates this place, he’s drawn back to it out of a debilitating sense of familial guilt: if he did not come home, there wouldn’t be anyone to witness the death of the place his grandfather built (and which drove his father to suicide). If Bill did not return, no one would be around to observe that without any meaningful work to do, Rust Belt people were as trapped and purposeless as zoo animals during the winter. No one would be around to suggest that “the truth” was just whatever the corporate-entertainment-culture complex said it was.

In other words, someone’s got to be there to identify the body.

What’s most interesting about The Keepers of Truth is that it’s written by an outsider. Michael Collins is an Irish immigrant who originally came to the United States on an athletic scholarship in the 1980s. Between semesters he drove around the country in an old station wagon, sleeping in parking lots and documenting the slow death of American prosperity. As a result, The Keepers of Truth is filled with a bleakness that can only come from an impartial observer, someone who doesn’t impose his own nostalgia upon the place. Although The Keepers of Truth does a meritorious job capturing the mood of the Reagan-era Rust Belt, it lacks the poignancy of Crooked River Burning because there’s no possibility of a better future.

Instead, it’s the stark chronicle of a culture that — perhaps — is best left to die.

So has “Rust Belt” outlived its usefulness? Well, that depends on what you want to use it for. “Rust Belt” was never meant as a marketing slogan, but rather to describe a region suffering from a period of economic decline.

There are three ways people use the term “Rust Belt”:

1. As an impartial, shorthand reference to the region that was once America’s manufacturing belt;
2. As a pejorative reference to that same region, suggestive of stagnation and decay;
3. As a defiant badge of pride, much like “Dixie”

What do I think? Although I have less interest in imposing a positive or negative interpretation on the term, I’ll admit to using “Rust Belt” to describe my own geographic heritage (as opposed to “Midwestern” or “Ohioan.”) I suspect that liking or disliking it is often a generational issue: people who remember gleaming steel think of Rust as a bad thing, but those of us who don’t remember anything else and like it here…well, Rust is just our culture. There is a passage in American Rust where young Billy Poe contemplates the broken-down, overgrown landscape that used to be the thriving steel mill town of Buell, Pennsylvania. To the older residents of Buell, the ruins represent failure. But Billy associates them with the happy moments in his childhood, when he roamed the landscape learning about trees and animals. To Billy, these ruins are beautiful because they’re all he’s ever known.

The Rust Belt question always brings to mind a story from an old episode of This American Life, where a Brooklyn musician transforms his Hasidic friend Chaim into an underground rock star. They decide to call him Curly Oxide, owing to Chaim’s rust-colored payots, and because oxidation (i.e., rust) represents one thing changing into another thing.

In other words, Rust doesn’t have to symbolize decay. It can symbolize metamorphosis.

There is an audience who is really hungering for honest, clever, artistic interpretations of the  Rust Belt. What evidence do I have? Take the snarky, self-effacing Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism videos:

There’s a reason why people responded so strongly and fervently to these videos — they fill an artistic gap that, say, regional marketing campaigns can and will never fill. No matter how clever or catchy they are.

Why can’t marketing-speak fill that gap? Because marketing by its very nature isn’t totally honest – you have to admit that. It takes the positive and blows it up — that’s how it achieves its purpose. Art looks at all angles, even when they hurt. Art and marketing are not the same thing. People think they want to be happy all the time, but art tells us that they don’t — they want to experience the full range of human emotions.

The best art emerging from the Rust Belt will be truthful and transformative. It will be thought up by hard-luck underachievers waiting for the bus, not in the conference rooms of any marketing firms. It won’t croon about what fun times can be had at the trendiest faux dive bars, but it will chronicle the anguish of those who are desperately trying to hold on to a long-dead ideal.

Rust Belt Literature probably has a lot in common with Southern Literature. As a story, Gone With the Wind shares many of the same characteristics as Crooked River Burning. It starts out in an improbably idyllic time that you watch uncomfortably because you know it’s going to end. There’s an equally doomed romance to keep an eye on. Both stories are big and filled with a dizzying array of historical details (including the not-so-subtle racism of the times).

And just as Gone With the Wind illustrates the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, an overarching theme of Crooked River Burning might be called “American Dream in Ruins.”  That is, focusing on that tenuous period between the birth of the middle class, and when that middle class began to falter — the period that Rust Belters look back on with as much problematic nostalgia as Lost Cause Southerners looked back upon the Confederacy.

Winegardner, Mark. Crooked River Burning. New York: Harvest Books, 2001.

Crooked River Burning has been in my to-read pile since 2006, when I bought a copy of Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, for which Mark Winegardner penned the afterword, “Toward a Literature of the Midwest.”

(Though I didn’t know it at the time, the roots of Rust Belt Reader took hold right then and there.)

In his afterword, Winegardner grimly recounts the following experience with his publishers, prior to the publication of Crooked River Burning:

We went into a big conference room. The marketing director started the meeting by saying (after admitting she hadn’t read the novel), “We see this as a strong regional book.” If it does well in the Midwest, she says, there’s hope it might catch on elsewhere.

They all seemed surprised when I asked if the elevator went to the roof, so I could go jump off.

However, this was long before All Things Local became the boutique obsession of the intellectual class, before consumers craved “authenticity” (a dressed-up marketing term for “slumming it”), before Detroit’s ruined urban landscape became emblematic of a corporate greed gone not just wild but metastatic, before recession chic became de rigueur in the Real Simple parlors of the elite.

So, given the enthusiasm heaped on American Rust (not to mention a whopping $400,000 advance; in a city where you can buy a house for the price of a VCR, do you know how many foreclosures that could forestall?), I can’t help but wonder if Winegardner’s publisher might cast a slightly more generous eye on the book now than they did in 2001. If for no other reason than its sheer, ambitious scope: in 561 pages, Winegardner sets out to answer a question that many a visitor to the American Rust Belt has undoubtedly asked: what the heck happened here, and why?

The story begins in 1948, not long before the Indians win the World Series — a time when young white kids listen furtively to something not-quite-rock ‘n roll-yet on scratchy transistor radios, a time of summer romances and soda pop and idling in your Uncle Stan’s Jeepster till the moon peeps out. A time when Cleveland is the Sixth Biggest City in the Greatest Country in the World.

It ends at the moment in the summer of 1969 when the sludge-fouled Cuyahoga River erupts in flames, propelling an increasingly jumpy and jaded city into a seemingly irreversible death-spiral.

In other words, the story follows the exact narrative any Cleveland old-timer will launch into directly before he says, “Eh, Cleveland’s a ghost town. Last one out, turn off the lights!”

On one level, Crooked River Burning is a fairly standard rendering of the age-old poor boy yearns after rich, untouchable girl scenario. (In truth, though, in a post-World War II industrial city, that “poor boy” is happily middle class.) However, since Cleveland is so astoundingly, unalterably doomed, and since the relationship between west-sider David Zielinsky and Shaker Heights-bred Anne O’Connor is going to parallel Cleveland’s demise, the reader can’t help but stick around to see how this thing is gonna crash and burn. Even if it does seem cruelly voyeuristic.

The chief flaw of Crooked River Burning lies in its greatest strength: though gratifyingly epic as Lord of the Rings, it is as if, when setting out to write this book, Mark Winegardner was afraid that this might be the only Cleveland novel ever written. It is not that he attempts too much — he pulls most of it off, anyway — but that he attempts so much that you expect everything to be in there, and it isn’t. (Most notably, there’s little to no mention of the auto industry.)

Is Crooked River Burning too regional? Peppered almost to the point of overload with local notables — including Eliot Ness, Dorothy Fuldheim, the infamous Dr. Sam Sheppard, and Carl Stokes — at times Crooked River Burning does seem like too much of a ham-handed local history lesson to interest anyone outside Cleveland. It’s hard to imagine Winegardner’s lengthy, ripped-straight-from-the-autobiography “Local Heroes” interludes in a novel set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (We’d all be expected to know who he was talking about, or at least pretend to, lest we look like rubes. Then again, perhaps the publisher insisted on them.) At times, I felt myself almost disoriented by reading a novel about Cleveland, as if it had been set there by mistake. (Oops! This one was supposed to be about Red Hook, but the typesetter accidentally put in “Cleveland.” Send this one off to Big Lots, wouldya?) Instead of the distinct Cleveland accent, I realized I was reading the part of political boss Tom O’Connor in the voice of controlling old Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life, or union tough Mike Zielinsky in the voice of Tony Soprano.

But the setting is never in doubt. It’s that penchant for evocative place-setting that sets Winegardner apart. At times I found myself taking highly personalized roadtrips from the storyline: during the summer of 1952, when David and Anne first meet on Kelleys Island, my dad is 11 years old, collecting freshwater clams on the mainland at Port Clinton. Later, as David looks out over the Detroit-Superior bridge, I wonder about who’s living in (what will become) my house, just a few miles west.

Does Crooked River Burning accomplish what it sets out to do? Does it capture a crucial moment in Rust Belt history? Yes. Does it provide a decent explanation for why, in order to live in Cleveland, “You Gotta Be Tough?” Somewhat. Good enough for many people.

But in attempting to answer this monumental why, Winegardner also suggests that maybe, just maybe, the question itself is Cleveland’s problem. That this question is part and parcel of a deeply-ingrained civic neurosis, whose other chief features include the muttered apologies for never quite measuring up, the heartbreakingly childish search for that One Big Thing to take the blame (and on which to hang obviously doomed hopes, namely, counting on African-American Mayor Carl Stokes to singlehandedly resolve “the Negro problem”), the relentless moping (“it just figures that it would happen to Cleveland!” being the all-purpose answer to everything from the Hough Riots to Jim Brown’s sudden retirement from the NFL.)

There is a secret magic that librarians practice called readers’ advisory — that is, finding the right book for the right person at the right time. Readers’ advisory is a fickle and complex art that requires you to have a sharp understanding of the subtleties of human character. Why do people read what they like? Sometimes they can’t even tell you, so you have to consider other books that have moved them, that have done what they wanted a book to do (make them laugh? make them think? make them feel better about their own downtrodden situation because someone else is always worse off?) … and guess.

Who would I recommend Crooked River Burning to? Well, there is an offshoot of readers’ advisory called bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy recognizes that reading can be a healing art, that it can bring catharsis. A bibliotherapist might give a child whose parent has died a book about another child whose parent has died.

Crooked River Burning is a therapeutic book not just for the reader who feels frustrated by his once-thriving city’s decline, but for the reader who takes that decline personally. It is a book that, if a reader was younger and sillier, he might keep on his bedside table like a nightlight, just so he knows it’ll be there when he’s most vulnerable.

In the end, it’s not so much answers that help, but stories. This is the conclusion that Anne O’Connor reaches at the end of the novel, shortly before the Cuyahoga River bursts into flame. She has a sudden vision of her brother, Steven, shot down over the Sea of Japan: “when she’d tried to write a novel about this, thinking that the story was so tragic and inevitable it would tell itself, she realized no story told itself. Stories are unruly. All a story can hope to be is a great unraveling of accepted truth. The mystery is the fact.”

But they can also be imperfect things. (I can say that — I’m a librarian.) For example, there’s no subject heading for “Rust Belt — Fiction.” And even if you look up something like “Pittsburgh — Fiction” or “Cleveland — Fiction,” there’s no guarantee that the book is really going to be about that place, if you catch my drift. For some stories, the setting is irrelevant. They could take place in Youngstown or on Jupiter — it would make no difference.

So how do you find these elusive Rust Belt tales? Well, that’s the tricky part, something I plan on sharing as I go. For now, though, I’ve come up with five  worthy candidates to start with. Here’s what’s on my current to-read list:

Crooked River Burning (Mark Winegardner; 2001)

The Keepers of Truth (Michael Collins; 2000)

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (Don Robertson; orig.pub. 1965; reissued 2008)

Steel Ashes (Karen Rose Cercone; 1997)

Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio (ed. Lisa Watts; 2007)

I’m happy to accept suggestions, so feel free to leave them in the comments or email rustbeltreader [at] gmail [dot] com.