Review of Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage

Everything that once was clean and nice and new will eventually become tainted and broken according to Ms. Campbell’s collection of short stories. Even the stories that ended happily contained a feeling of loss, a change of perspective with an overall negative skew, or some sort of defiled innocence. In its entirety, though, I couldn’t help but accept this negativity and understand that, though these stories were gritty, they could have been worse. It’s that little glimmer of hope hidden behind the Pandora’s box of life that kept me reading page after page of this collection with an intensity that made me forget where I was and what was around me.

Do not pick up this collection if you are at all squeamish about graphic detail as Ms. Campbell has not held back where she felt description was necessary, and the stories are all the better for it. Do not pick up this book if you dislike people making fun of men, the religiously misguided, or the darker sides of human nature because Ms. Campbell does not leave those subjects alone. Do not pick up this book if you fear helplessness because there are few stories where the subject is not discussed.

If you have, however, gotten this far and are still interested in reading American Salvage, do so. There are very few short story authors who can grab your attention, keep it, and make you unable to put their book down. Short story collections are just not built in a manner that allows for this intensity. It is a great feat to be able to grab hold of a reader and not let go, especially through multiple story conclusions, and Ms. Campbell does it masterfully.

Beyond that there was a decidedly unique perspective inserted into each of these stories that very few writers can manage successfully, a sort of vindictiveness that, on the surface, is presented as a benign rivalry with understandable and organic progressions. Even as I thought about the interactions and tried to determine which ones were unnecessary, I found that each one straddled that cusp so precariously and cleanly that it was almost impossible to tell.

Ms. Campbell has written some incredible stories that anyone can connect to and does so without any sort of agenda or purpose beyond realism. In this way I both respect her work, her skill, and can’t but tell people about this collection.

Campbell, Bonnie Jo. American Salvage. Detroit, Wayne State University Press: 2009.