Media

Packard -- 'the Remainder of a City Within the City' -- Is Detroit Novel's Backdrop

October 01, 2015, 7:25 AM by  Alan Stamm

The protagonist of "Scrapper," the second novel by acclaimed author Matt Bell, is "a loner loner living off what he scrounges from the abandoned sector of Detroit known as The Zone,” as a Houston bookstore blogger posts.

Featured_matt_bell_by_hannah_ensor_18685
Matt Bell says the Packard plant is "a fascinating place on its own and a sort of Rorschach test for anyone writing about the city."

Penguin Random House, the publisher, says: "Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches."

Bell says his 320-page book, published this month, is mostly "about the relationship between fear and violence.” He visits Detroit this week for a Write a House event Friday evening, where he'll read from the hardback. (Location and other details are here.) 

The author was a lifelong Michiganian until he joined Arizona State University last year as an assistant professor of creative writing. He taught earlier at the University of Michigan and Northern Michigan University.

"Scrapper" was inspired by a 2012 documentary short, "Dismantling Detroit." The five-minute film by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady follows jobless men collecting metal at abandoned factories.

For the protagonist of his fictional version, Bell imagines a Michigan native and a college dropout -- Kelly -- who spent a decade in construction jobs down South. After a romantic breakup, he heads back north but can't get work in recession-pounded Detroit. So Kelly resorts to scrapping.

The Texas blogger, a book buyer identified only as Keaton, interviews Bell. Here's more from his recent post:

Through Kelly, the macro-level socioeconomic violence wrought by rapacious and unchecked capitalism that led to the fall of Detroit finds its parallel within the most corrosive notions of traditional masculinity. . .

On his quest, Kelly is constantly at odds with . . . becoming “the salvor” — he who saves — and “the scrapper” — he who destroys. He wants to protect the vulnerable, even as he is himself a victimizer. He wants to redeem himself, even at the cost of his own destruction. He wants to conquer the fear he has harbored within himself ever since childhood. Yet, violence is the only avenue he finds available. . . .

He is our Rosetta Stone for the world around him — the personification of the decaying city, sifting through the remnants of the past, selling off what he can in order to stave off the encroachment of a hopeless future. 

Bell spoke more recently with Kelsey Ronan of Cleveland's Belt Magazine, who posts Wednesday:

When Kelly finds a kidnapped boy chained up in the basement of an abandoned house, his solitary life sorting through the wreckage of the city is interrupted. The story that ensues explores regret, redemption, and the cost of violence in both our private lives and on the global scale of racism, war and industry.

The author talks to Ronan, who grew up in Flint and now works in St. Louis, about the Packard plant -- a setting for his opening pages:

As I started researching metal scrapping and abandoned buildings, it came up often, as image and symbol and problem. It was one of the first specific locations I wrote about — but I didn’t visit it personally until I’d already written the first versions of the scenes that take place inside the ruins of the plant. . . .

It’s notable as a decades-old ruin, as a seemingly unsolvable problem for the city, and as a remnant of the greatest days of both the automobile industry and of the city Detroit seemed it would become. It’s a fascinating place on its own, as well as a sort of Rorschach test for anyone writing about the city. . . .

The main thing I was researching during my visits while I wrote "Scrapper" . . . was how it felt to be in these emptied buildings, in certain neighborhoods being reclaimed by nature. I had an idea that there were places in the center of Detroit where you could stand in what was essentially pasture, looking out toward the better-lit, more populous parts of the city.

It was quite a different thing to actually be in such a place, listening to the crickets and the distant sounds of traffic, watching the streets go dark while the buildings in the distance turned their lights on.

Read two samples of 'Scrapper'

From the foreword, titled "Detroit:"

See the body of the plant, one hundred years of patriots' history, fifty years an American wreck. The remainder of a city within the city, a fortress of squared buildings a mile long and five blocks wide. Three million square feet of interior. A century of reinforced concrete and red brick and steel crossbeams still standing despite injury, of parking lots stretched around miles of emptiness, their lights long ago darkened, their torn and opened fences made an invitation to the gutting.

See the factory road left open to an incurious public, see the once-famous signs stuttering in broken glass across the bridge between buildings, hung high over the dregs of opposing traffic. and in each last windowpane see a letter, together reading MO_OR CITY IN_U_TR__L PARK.

See how names were not just markers but promises. See how the first name the sign had cried had been gone even longer. How in the city the advance of history displaced what it could not destroy, erase, unfinish: an American exclusion zone. There were signs here few strangers would see again. Except in the photographs of urban explorers. Destruction porn. Except through the window of a bulldozer. Destruction.

See the unsteady structures of the plant's surface, their danger multiplying with every floor climbed above the street, every movement there a possible cascade of effect, complicating the last solutions against gravity and entropy. Find the limits of bravery at the threshold of ground and underground, entrances inside the plant where if you knew where to crawl you could get beneath the piled rubble to gaze into basements, cellars, long-locked storage buried beneath factory floors, miles of tunnel for insulated electrical wire and telephone cable, copper pipes for water and steam.

Everywhere you look, everywhere see the barely imaginable past. 

From Part One, Chapter 1, titled "The Zone:"

The farther he moved toward the center of the zone the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered the cliffs of the state from off the land, shaped the dunes he’d dreamed of often after he’d left the state. The streets here were empty of traffic and in some neighborhoods the grass overran the sidewalks. He parked his truck, got out, walked the paved lanes instead. On trash days he could tell whether a house was occupied by whether or not a container appeared at the curb. There were other methods of determining inhabitation: the sound of televisions or radios, the presence of cut grass. But some men cut the grass for their neighbors to hide how they were the last ones living on their block. A way of pretending normality, despite the boarded windows, the graffiti, the other front doors never opened. Despite the absolute absence of other cars, other human voices.

Mostly it was easier. Mostly there was no question where there were people left behind. The only questions he had to ask were about opportunity, risk, metal.

Featured_packard-collapse_6023_18688
"Kelly could picture the city’s glory days but it took a certain imagination." (Photo by Steve Neavling)

Whenever Kelly entered an uninhabited house he understood he entered some life he might have lived, how the emptiness of every room pulled him inside out. A furnishing of the self. He opened the front door and the house ceased its stillness. If it had ever been inert it wasn’t now. No structure was once it held a human consciousness. In the South Kelly had worked construction, had seen firsthand how a house unlived in wasn’t a house. It was so easy to awaken a place. The way a doorknob awoke a memory. The way the angles of a room recalled other rooms. There were blueprints etched across his memories, and in some houses those memories activated: the bedrooms of his parents, the bedrooms of his parents’ friends. An angle of light like one he’d lain in as a child, reading a book on birds. The deep dark of a basement, the other dark of an attic. How the fear of the dark hung at the lip of a basement stairs, how it hesitated at the foot of any stairs leading up, toward whatever was below or above the house, outside its public space. . . .

Kelly could picture the city’s glory days but it took a certain imagination. On the television in his barely furnished apartment he watched a blonde reporter say the collapse was still in progress but now it was down to the aftershocks. Sometimes the news interviewed one of the left behind. Once this man or woman had been an autoworker or a grocery clerk like anyone else. What mysteries they were now, the blonde reporter said, these unemployed men and women with their forlorn streets, their locked doors nested behind locked doors.

Why didn’t they leave, if things were so bad.

© 2015 Penguin Random House



Leave a Comment:

Photo Of The Day