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American
Salvage
by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Wayne
State University Press
2009, Paperback
First collection? No.
awards: Finalist, 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year, nominated, national Book Award & National Book Critics
Circle Award; short story The
Inventor, 1972 won the Eudora Welty Prize for Fiction
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Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the story collection Women & Other Animals, and a
novel, Q Road. She has won a
Pushcart Prize, The AWP Award for Short Fiction and The Southern
Review’s Eudora Welty Prize. Her work has appeared in many literary
journals.
Read
an interview
with Bonnie Jo Campbell
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"Both he and King
watched the cylinder arc ten feet in the air and momentarily capture
the cold sunlight. It landed with a resounding clang on the pile of
catalytic converters—mostly they were dirty and rusted from the light
and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of
platinum."
Reviewed by Derek Green
As
the title hints, Bonnie Jo Campbell's collection of stories, American
Salvage,
takes
readers to a part of America most of us never glimpse first hand—a
place where people still live in homes without electricity; where men
join militias and stock up on fuel and ammunition as they wait, with
barely concealed eagerness, for the end of civilization; where many
inhabitants have long ago given up even pretending they will salvage
anything from life and opt to numb themselves with cheep booze and
even cheaper drugs.
Although the stories are not linked by formal device, they are deeply
connected by a sense of place—in this case, rural Michigan, where
Campbell grew up. Her Michigan is a landscape of contradictions—at once
beautiful and blighted, cherished and detested. Her characters merge
seamlessly with these surroundings, taking on the same qualities of
ruined potential, steady decline and grinding desperation—all of which
provide constant sources of tension to fuel the individual stories.
Campbell, who writes with a tough, sinewy prose that is by turns
outright hilarious and deeply unsettling, never flinches from her
material. Yet in these tales of thoughtless crimes, botched
money-making schemes and hapless accidents, she often finds moments of
surprising beauty and occasional grace.
In King Cole's American Salvage,
we meet the eponymous King Cole—a local salvage magnate—and William
Slocum, Jr., "eleven months out of prison," a friend of King's nephew,
Johnny. When Slocum needs money to pay off his girlfriend's mortgage
and buy the methamphetamine she craves, he decides to rob Cole, a man
reputed to carry large sums of cash on his person. King resists,
however, and Slocum beats him nearly to death. Although he eventually
recovers, King suffers permanent impairment, and comes to rely on
Johnny to do even he simplest chores needed to run the scrap yard.
The closing scene—in which Johnny works, grimly scrapping car parts,
under the gaze of his frustrated uncle—perfectly displays Campbell's
skill at capturing flashes of humanity in the wreckage surrounding her
characters. After Johnny wrenches a catalytic converter from a scrapped
car and tosses it on a heap, Campbell continues:
"Both he and King watched the cylinder arc ten feet in the
air and
momentarily capture the cold sunlight. It landed with a resounding
clang on the pile of catalytic converters—mostly they were dirty and
rusted from the light and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies
contained a core of platinum."
The haunting second-person piece, The
Solutions to Brian's Problem,
runs a mere six paragraphs, each outlining a possible response that
title-character Brian might make to the serious dilemma in which he
finds himself: raising a baby boy as his wife becomes increasingly
dependant drugs. Solution #2 reads: "Wait until Connie comes back from
the ‘store,' distract her with the baby, and then cut her meth with
Drano, so that when she shoots it up, she dies." Or, from Solution #5,
"Blow your head off with the twelve-gauge you keep behind the seat of
your truck." By simply laying out, one after another, the no-win
choices facing Brain, Campbell allows us to experience his rage,
desperation and sorrow more efficiently and viscerally than might have
been possible in a much longer story.
Though her stories deal in stark and often disturbing emotions,
Campbell never settles for easy cynicism. That's the case in Bore
Taint, the final story in the collection. In it, a young
post-doc
student named Jill has left the university to marry Ernie, a rural
farmer ten years her senior, whom she met on field assignment a year
had half previously.
Though she loves him, Jill longs to prove herself to Ernie, a kind,
gentle man of the land whose "calmness might be the antidote to
everything uneasy in her." Jill also wants to disprove her own family's
belief that "just because she'd studied agriculture for a year didn't
mean she knew a damn thing about farming." Against Ernie's quiet
skepticism, and as part of a money-making scheme, Jill decides to buy a
boar hog for the suspiciously low price of $25 from the mysterious farm
down the road.
In harrowing detail Campbell follows Jill's descent into a mini heart
of darkness. Jill pays the menacingly silent and spectacularly poor
farmers, only to discover a horribly injured animal, starved and barely
possessed of the strength to climb into her stock trailer. On the way
home, the animal dies in the trailer, and Jill arrives, devastated,
wondering if the entire trip had merely been some way of hastening the
end of the mistake of her impetuous marriage. She parks in the driveway
and "Ernie looked at her expectantly, but she didn't want to get out of
the truck. There was no point in getting out of the truck and showing
Ernie the pig—he knew, had known all along, what folly this was."
But Ernie doesn't give up so easily. When he goes to check on the
animal, he discovers it is still alive, though suffering from, among
other things, several gunshot wounds. But Ernie believes it can be
nursed back to health. Was it Ernie's gentleness that brought the
animal back? The scene of the neighbor's animals? No matter, because
the small miracle of the tainted boar's survival rallies Jill's spirit,
making her believe that she can last another day, another year. "This
boar," she realizes, "turned out to be exactly what she needed, a
creature even bullets could not stop."
That spirit—of fighting in the face of staggering adversity, of making
do with what can be salvaged from life, of enduring—suffuses this
remarkable collection of stories from a very gifted writer.
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