A slow-paced novel that explores the shortcomings of the soul when the person is stripped of the material. The economic crisis, the economic depression gives rise to scenarios where the lack of material support, in a lifestyle based on that, on the tangible, degenerates into gray souls whose hopes seem to disappear at the rate of the loss of purchasing power.
In this book Rust valley we are presented with a typical scenario of deep america, but one that is easily recognizable and extrapolated to any corner of the world in this global economy. The most stimulating thing about this reading is that aspect of the personal on the macroeconomic, of the particular compared to the trend graphs, the figures for public debt or social spending.
The American dream is increasingly transformed into the nightmare of fiction. In the richest country in the world, or one of the first, there is the paradox that its citizens can find themselves helpless from one day to the next. Isaac, the protagonist of this novel, is an intellectually gifted young man with the will to get ahead, but he must remain weighed down by his sick father, his decaying town and that valley where everything smells of abandonment.
Together with Isaac, we meet Billy Poe, another boy with many possibilities but no longer any hint of reality. A powerful sense of inertia moves the lives of the two boys, with a permanent sense of the imminent escape in search of a future.
And one day they decide. Both end up fleeing from there with no other suitcase than their hopes and dreams. But fate is stubborn and treacherous as alone. Shortly after embarking on his uncertain path, the plan was completely upset, his plan at least, because the reader could always have thought that no, that there was no way out of that magnetic place.
Raised in sadness, despair, lack of dreams, the two boys are suddenly faced with the crossroads of their lives. The decisions they make will end up shaping the idea of whether or not destinations can be rewritten by force of will.
There is a certain charm in decadence, and this book boasts such a feeling. As you read, you become intoxicated by a heavy idea that the simplest routine confers a certain immortality on the characters, the moments, and your whole life in general. Recommended as a bedside book to end the day with a leisurely reading.
You can buy the book Rust valley, Philipp Meyer's latest novel, here: