American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell

I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankees brought their Baptist faith and their cornbread up North and started raising families. Exiles from the Bible belt, singing the songs of the lord in a foreign land.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s remarkable book of short stories American Salvage captures this experience of the Yankee South, however unintentionally. All the stories in the book take place in Michigan, a truth made more poignant by the fact that Salvage was published by Wayne State University Press as part of their “Made in Michigan Series.” It seems rare to find a writer of Campbell’s talent stake such a strong regional claim. The notion of a “regional” literature seemed, for a time, to be the purview of Southerners alone–and the ocassional “Westerner” (Cormac McCarthy; Annie Prolux?).

American Salvage, however, is distinctly Michigan. But in being so distinct, Campbell pays homage to Michigan’s cultural dependence on the South. These characters would be just as comfortable in a Faulkner tale or a Peter Taylor short story as they are here in this colder clime.

I read American Salvage over the Christmas holiday while on my way to Michigan to visit my family. The characters evoked memories of my people, my family, and perhaps for this reason alone I felt a deep connection to Campbell and her story collection.

But these stories are more than just evocative. Campbell is a master craftswoman. She has a seemingly innate sense of how to control language and employ it in story. The beginning of the story the Inventor:

A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow.

Two terse sentences that set up a story of loss and love, a story with one small part sexual tension and one big part discovery. The El Camino driven by a man who would be good, but who has only ever been the Other. In telling the story, Campbell gives the reader just enough to move to the next sentence with growing anticipation.

The fourteen stories in the collection share a tone and often a subject, though it would be difficult to pin that subject down like a moth. It is the stuff of life, and particularly the stuff of life in rural Michigan.

Campbell’s book was the runner up for this year’s National Book Award, an honor she fully deserves. As part of the festivities for the award, Campbell gave this fine reading of one of the stories in the collection. Not the story I would have selected for her to read, but a great piece none the less.

finalistread f campbell from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Check out her website too www.bonniejocampbell.com .

On her blog she had some great snippets of the speech she intended to give had she won the National Book Award.  I’ll conclude with this, which, IMHO, makes Ms. Campbell a damn fine Southern Yankee.

This award is good news for writers who feel uncertain, for writers who choose to live in small towns in Michigan or Maine because they feel a profound connection to their own people and landscape. This is good news for writers who do not feel brilliant, but who want to work hard to get it right

It’s that “profound connection to their own people and landscape” part that I’ll ruminate on.