Setting

The setting of the novel extract “Grace” by Philipp Meyer portrays a typical landscape for towns belonging to the Rust Belt:

The main road south of Buell angled away from the river to cut through a steep sunless valley; it was a narrow fast road with the trees tight along both sides. She passed vacant hamlets, abandoned service stations, an exhausted coal mine with a vast field of tailings that stretched on forever like sand dunes, gray and dry and not even the weeds would grow on them.

From the beginning, the narrative introduces a dark atmosphere that highlights the state of the towns after deindustrialization. The buildings are abandoned and dilapidated, which shows that the steel industry has disappeared. 

When she thinks about Brownsville, Grace considers that “the city had once been promising but now it was mostly abandoned, ten-story buildings and hotels, all empty”. The people who have remained behind are paid “minimum wage” and struggle to keep their jobs: “Once people got jobs, even crappy ones, they tended to stay in them.” This hints at the economic decline caused by deindustrialization. 

The current state of Buell and Brownsville is described in contrast to the past when both towns were flourishing: 

She remembered when the whistle blew and shiftchange clogg...