Scrapper Kindle Edition

Oh my word...this book is exquisite. From the first sentence, I was drawn into it. The writing is so beautiful, I kept stopping and re-reading entire sections. My ex and I have spent time in Detroit exploring and wondering and learning the history of the city and the neighborhoods while I photographed as much as possible of what we saw. I wanted to capture it before it was gone forever. Matt Bell writes the way I think and it took me back to the days we had spent at the Packard Plant and in the neighborhoods. I bought a first edition hardcover for myself to keep on my coffee table with "Detroit: 138 Square Miles" a photography book my brother bought me and a coffee table book I had made of my first photography trip to the neighborhoods of Detroit. I also bought a paperback copy for my ex and had it sent to him. This stunning scope of this book brings the sadness of this beautiful city to full color. Reading about a book a week, it takes a lot to bump into my "top 10 of forever" book list. This book is number 2. Along with Charlie LeDuff's incredible "Detroit: Autopsy of an American City", if you love Detroit, read these 2 books.

I am tonight putting the book aside, half way read. Murky prose, vague plot lines, and sexual undertones that I can’t tell if I am making up in my confusion, or if against hope they will eventually coalesce into revulsion after being Invited to dive so deep into Kelly’s troubled psyche. Why so nervous over the boy’s call and visit, why is befriending the boy something he shouldn’t be doing? Tension and release is one thing, but tension alone is just that. Boys in basements coupled with hellish urban landscapes, ambiguous morals hidden just beyond comprehension? Nope.

Wow. Very interesting! First/third person? Had to pay attention and put down occasionally to recuperate. Found the subject matter a little troubling at times, but overall reminded me of The Road. The chill and darkness of the city compelling.

This was different from Bell's other work I've read, slipperier than normal at least. That's saying something too. There are definite touches of darkness, though that isn't new. Far from pleasant, which is no reason to judge a book negatively anyway, this one gave a great deal to think on-though much of that as I saw it was not stated directly.

As great as expected. Buy it.

Just wasn't what I expected.

An amazing psychological journey through the protagonist's mind and the streets of Detroit.

Scrapper refers to Kelly, a young man who forages for scrap metal and salvageable parts of abandoned buildings in an area of Detroit known as the zone. He removes and sells the parts by the pound. In this dystopian future, “The remainder of a city within the city…A century of reinforced concrete and red brick and steel crossbeams…their torn and opened fences made an invitation to the gutting,” the landscape is an urban area of waste and disuse described as “destruction porn.” A few people still live here, but most have moved to more habitable areas. Kelly, however, is running away from his past, and punishing himself for crimes later revealed. Working in the zone is a way to wrestle with his conscience. He left his lover and her son in the South (unnamed place) and lives as a loner, until he meets a woman, Jackie, a police dispatcher with a noticeable limp due to degenerative disease. However, her crippled body houses a guardian spirit, an irony not lost on the reckless, hollowed out anti-hero.This fabled tale is about redemption--of the darkest parts of the soul, and the bleakest aspects of society. Bell’s harrowing landscape symbolizes the collapsed morality buckling under end-stage hope. Kelly believes in two parts of the self—the violent scrapper and the righteous salver, and it is these two halves he tries to reconcile, to undo the damage in a world fraught with pain. When he finds a kidnapped boy chained in a basement in one of the zone’s abandoned houses, Kelly is determined to find and confront the person who did this, and, in a twisted way, redeem his own errors and those of his father, and his father’s father before him.This is where the story breaks down for me. The prose, while sometimes piercing and filled with metaphors of devastation and misery, is just as often reworked clichés written in declarative sentences, and leans toward self-conscious.“There were no space spaces except those you made yourself. Safety could not be granted. Safety was the absence of anyone stronger or weaker. And always there was someone stronger or weaker, someone greater than, less than. The only true safety was the deepest kind of loneliness and for a time Kelly had chosen it.”“…and the man who cried said the suffering of the individual had been eclipsed by the suffering of the masses. Eartquakes in Haiti, tsunamis and nuclear devastation in Japan. Genocides in Africa…” etc, “All I’m saying, the man who never cried said, is that there are whole cities falling into the ocean, whole species going extinct…We’re here wailing about a single human life. He said, I love my wife but she’s the equivalent of a thousand starving children…”The text labors on these prosaisms where it isn’t necessary, but is murky where it needs to be more transparent. The narrative breadth reached its limit way before the author intended it to. In other words, the furnishings and philosophies are repeatedly expounded upon, the author hammering home a point that was already obvious. But the manifestation of actual events is inevitably banal, however padded, and the author gluts the reader with yet another extraneous meditation on doom. I get the sense that Bell was aiming to stretch out a thin story with a grand theme, but I became weary. He was trying too hard for effect, and the prose, which echoed Cormac McCarthy but lacked the master’s immaculate precision, was used as compensation for a strained story. And, sometimes, the overuse of non-specific pronouns, such as “he,” or descriptors, such as “the girl with the limp,” “the man who cried,” etc. seems superfluous, as if the redundancy is supposed to imply additional weightiness.Moreover, Bell’s plot unfolds evasively, even confusedly, with provocative but intended complementary events concerning the music rapper Mos Def and his visit to a detainee in Guantánamo; a scene with Michael Zimmerman in Florida, and a scene near Chernobyl in Russia. But it came off as overreaching, or gratuitous, almost like filler standing in for fullness. When the story does reach its apex, and Kelly decides on a specific act, it is an act that, to me, contorted the rest of the story, made it nearly insensate.The story searches for atonement in an inhumane world, a place where base desires and lawless atrocities have eclipsed hope and kindness, where corruption and evil have subjugated decency and rectitude. I felt that the author led us there, to reparation, but then it inevitably became pointless. Occasionally I felt inside of the zone where justice is weighed at a cost, but at other times, it seemed I was just standing there with scraps.