American Rust

American Rust is a novel by American writer Philipp Meyer, published in 2009. It is set in the 2000s, in the fictional town of Buell in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, which is in a rural region referred to as "the Valley" of dilapidated steel towns. The novel focuses on the decline of the American middle class and well-paying manufacturing jobs, and the general sense of economic and social malaise. Meyer's novel received positive reviews, and many publications ranked it one of the best novels of the year. American Rust was published in 2009 in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and The Netherlands (in Dutch); in 2010 it was published (in translation) in France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Israel, Greece, and Serbia. Writing style American Rust is a third person, stream-of-consciousness work influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman. Comparisons mostly include works by modernist writers: The Baltimore Sun compared it to Faulkner; Roger Perkins of The Daily Telegraph, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, and Ron Charles of The Washington Post all compared it to the works of Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and J.D. Salinger. Geordie Williamson, head literary critic of The Australian, compared Meyer to Steinbeck in a radio interview, saying "Steinbeck is alive and well, and his name is Philipp Meyer." Williamson also compared Meyer to Sinclair Lewis and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the print edition of his review.