American Rust: A Novel

The stream-of-consciousness style has been employed for over a century, most prominently by writers such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce. With its run-on sentences and lack of punctuation, it seeks to provide a window into the characters’ thought processes. Meyer uses the technique extensively. Most of his characters—Isaac and Poe in particular—spend most of the narrative alone, and, with no one to talk to, they retreat into their own thoughts. It not only adds a sense of realism (people’s thoughts are rarely neatly structured) but it also emphasizes each character’s unique sense of solitude. Isaac cannot confide in Lee or his father; Poe cannot confess the truth of the crime to Harris or his lawyer; Henry cannot tell Isaac how he admires him lest Isaac run off to college and leave Henry alone. Rather than using terrible economic conditions as an opportunity to build community, these characters, raised on the ethos of individualism, suffer in silence. Their equivocating desires bounce back and forth in their minds like pinballs.