This book reeks of atmosphere, of a decaying steel mill town in the 21st century, just north and east of Pittsburgh, on the Monongahela River. Buell was once a flourishing mill town in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, where a man could make thirty bucks an hour, support his family, buy a house and car, even send his kid to college if he so desired. But then things changed, the mills closed, the men lost their jobs, their manhood, their drive. Most never left, instead stayed behind, watching their town, their kids, their families slowly fall apart. The atmosphere is so accurate and realistic that I could picture myself there, as I have driven past and through many towns like this.
So, that's the setting for a story about two very different boys, Isaac, the resident nerd, the smartest kid in school, his best friend Poe, the football star, and Isaac's sister, Lee, who has escaped all this, goes to Yale and marries well. We also are let in to the heads of Grace, Poe's mother, and Harris, the Police Chief. Isaac decides to leave his bedridden father, an invalid since an accident at one of the mills, and head for California. Poe decides to go with him for the first day, they stay in an abandoned warehouse, and are accosted by three vagrants. They put a knife to Poe's neck, begin to molest him, and Isaac picks up an iron ball, throws it, and kills one of the men. They all flee and thus begins the story.
Harris, the Police Chief, finds Poe's letter jacket at the murder site, implicating Poe in the murder, but not Isaac. Neither boy knows exactly what to do, so Isaac decides to flee, grabs his pack back, and jumps a train, heading for Detroit. In alternating chapters, we follow his trip west, his losing his back pack, getting ripped off, and chased by the police, with Poe, who is eventually arrested by Harris, put in a Federal Prison while he awaits the trial and finds himself harassed by both the Black and White inmates. He ends up sending one of the Black dudes to the hospital, making the White's happy but then kills his bunk mate who comes at him with a knife, angering the White dudes. Poe refuses to implicate Isaac, as he sees it, it's his fault because he refused to back down in the abandoned warehouse. Isaac's sister figures in somewhat, as she feels guilty for having left Isaac with her invalid father, wants to help both Isaac and Poe but is not sure how.
The other thread involves Harris, the lonely sheriff, who has loved Poe's mother, Grace, for years. She finally puts her ex husband behind her and she and Harris begin a relationship of intimacy, perhaps even care. Harris realizes that this relationship may be Grace's way of hoping to save her son, but he doesn't care. He loves her and doesn't want to live alone any more and is willing to risk all for Grace. He drives off to where one of the vagrants who implicated Poe lived, accosts him, and when the vagrant fights back, he shoots him and his friend.
All's well that ends well, sort of. Though Poe gets knifed in prison, he survives and because the witnesses are found murdered, he will go free. Isaac makes up his mind to go to school, Harris seems to have kept his job, and Lee goes home to her husband. Though nothing is explicit at the end of the novel, we assume Grace takes up with Harris. I did like this book quite a bit, especially it's description of the town, it's people, and their struggles to make do in a world where nothing is made any more. A depressing picture of a segment of America which is not going to return to the good old days.
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