Anthony Oliver's overnight country sensation, Rich Men North of Richmond, expresses the dissatisfaction of the working man in a protest song about the average American "selling his soul" for "bullsh!t pay." It reminds me of themes in three new-ish books, all very different from each other, but which are linked by the theme of corporations--and the rich men there--that use and use up workers and move on without a care. Or even worse, they move in to prey upon the desperation of the unemployed who attempt to deal with their wrecked lives by medicating their internal and external pains with drugs, alcohol and with addictive prescriptions especially marketed to them.
Brian Broome's
Punch Me Up to the Gods (Mariner, 2021) is only tangentially about this theme, but this idea is threaded through his memoir as it also inextricably linked to the place that the author came from. Broome grew up in Rust Belt Ohio, in a town that was white, homophobic and without opportunity, with parents struggling with job loss in the steel mills, with a lack of education, and with the attendant psychological scars that bears. His memoir is an exploration of leaving home and finding himself in a new city, with new friends, and a new outlook on life. That completely simplifies the struggle that he went through, though, and while his writing is compelling, it is also raw, gritty, emotional, perceptive, and even cringe-inducing. Broome is also a wonderful public speaker, and I had a chance to hear him speak about this book and the importance of writing memoirs. One of his messages was about not only writing about what people did to you, but what you did to other people.
Idra Novey's novel,
Take What You Need (Viking, 2023), had me scratching my head, because I wasn't sure that I loved it, but it was fascinating to me. Telling the story of one family through alternating chapters from the daughter's and the stepmother's points of view, it is about two people who end up escaping the poverty and its accompanying emotional bankruptcy in the southern Allegheny Mountains. Leah, the daughter, accomplishes that by leaving the area (and even the country), while Jean does it by creating fantastical constructions of used steel and found objects. These two had formed a tight bond, until it was destroyed by Leah's father and Jean's husband, and the story that follows is an adult Leah discovering who her stepmother really was.
Barbara Kingsolver's
Demon Copperhead (Harper, 2022) is a masterpiece of a novel based on Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. It is one of those works that has four extraordinary "frames," meaning that the plot, the characterizations, the tone, and setting are all equally strong and well constructed. In the story, bad things happen to young Demon (as they do to David C), and you know that they are going to get worse, but the character of Demon is so engaging and likable and accepting of his fate, that the reader is cheering him throughout the novel; even more impressive is that the book is incredibly funny, a major feat when writing about an orphan whose living conditions are truly awful. Set in Appalachia in the 1980s, it is about the devastation brought on by the opioid epidemic and its effect on Demon and the many people around him. One character, a nurse, is fully aware of what is going on with the pharmaceutical company pushing this drug, and the author does a powerful job describing how it all worked with sales reps, doctors, local pharmacies, illicit trade, and so on. While I won't say more about the plot, it is incredibly compelling, and the audio version is especially fine. This title is on my "everyone should read this book" list, and it makes one think about so many things, including why the Sackler family (of PurduPharma) has gotten off scott free.
Be prepared to look at the rich and powerful in new ways through these three books that remind us that American citizens are more than cogs in corporate machines while also shining the light on the humanity in each and every person.
