- Paperback: 170 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co. (17 Mar 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 039333919X
- ISBN-13: 978-0393339192
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 16.8 x 1.2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 76,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
The effect of American Salvage is that Campbell 's Michigan lingers and cannot be ignored or forgotten.
Product 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.
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29 reviews
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful
American Salvage
5 May 2009
Format:Paperback
I just finished Bonnie Jo Campbell's latest book of short stories, AMERICAN SALVAGE (Wayne State University Press, 2009). This is a fascinating book full of 3-D characters who jump off the page. These are people trying to get by, and many times not succeeding, in a world where other people seem to have it all. There are farm families looking for the next way to break even. There are drunks and drug users who try to balance out their lives through violence or love. There are many who remember their best days which are firmly behind them, sometimes in high school, sometimes much earlier. Many of the characters are workers though some not regularly. For others, their steady jobs in the papermills or other factories are far more regular then their off-duty time. My favorite is the dark "Storm Warning" where an accident leaves a man to play out all his anxieties and fears in the midst of a gathering monster of a thunderstorm. Though the title is taken from one of the stories in the collection, it as well could signify the way these well- developed characters and their lives are tossed about to become a flotsam and jetsam of modern life. Everyone in Michigan may enjoy the tie some stories have to the greater Kalamazoo area that Bonnie Jo Campbell calls home. Add this one to the summer (or late spring) reading pile.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
One Helluva Book
26 May 2009
Format:Paperback
Here's the straight poop, as they say: American Salvage is a really great read. I could just end it there, but that doesn't feel like enough. Okay, Campbell's characters are really intriguing, and she puts them in strange and sometimes bizarre situations that get at some pretty big human truths. The truths . . . no matter who we are we are prone to addiction, wanting safety, and wanting to love and be loved. We are afraid and we are brave. We get ourselves behind hopeless plans, and sometimes find they are the only plans for us . . . and sometimes we make them work. All of these truths are truths we already know, but in the hands of a story teller like Campbell . . . well, she just takes the reader on a really cool trip. I'm just fascinated by the situation in her "Storm Warning" when the main character, nearly crippled from a boating accident, can't believe that his girlfriend of six months saved his life, rescued him from drowning. So pig-headed and afraid is he that when he returns from the hospital, he drives her away. He finds himself alone in a hospital bed in his house, watching as a horrendous storm blows in, knocking out power around the lake. Helpless, unable to even get a glass of water, he swallows his Vicodin with saliva. He's so utterly alone . . . and he's put himself there. I mean, you have to buy the book just to see how that one turns out. You should buy the book, too, because Bonnie Jo is a Michigan writer. Seriously, you won't be disappointed. Campbell is simply a great writer worth reading.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
I read it; then I read it again
9 Jun 2009
Format:Paperback
In the best collections of short stories the setting becomes a character as well-realized as any of the human characters. In "American Salvage," turn of the 20th Century rural Michigan, home to big, beautiful snakes, white ermine, and deer that dance across the lake, is the backdrop for people with lives of often self-inflicted drama they would never recognize as particularly dramatic. For them it is more an ache in the chest, a wistful longing for a little bit more for folks who don't have a lot and don't expect much. These sometimes explosive tales are told in an understated fashion that keep the characters believable. At the same time the revealing details, like platinum at the core of a piece of scrap metal, give the collection a savage beauty.
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