“You know they say the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,” one of his union car worker coworker buddies said, and he said that he had heard that and they talked about women some more, and drank more beer and lost the third game but probably won in the fun column still.” (86)
Dan Denton’s new book is the sort of manual new hires at any factory job should get on the first day of their first shift, except that HR would never let it happen because they worry no one would stay on the line. If you’ve not had the blue collar work experience, reading Dan Denton is a good way to start beginning to understand what your parents’ and grandparents’ generations went through to make sure you had a life involving the brand name Kraft macaroni and cheese.
Our protagonist is unnamed. We see him get a job because his father had a job in the same car factory. There’s this story going around, a story that’s mostly true, about the mobility of the modern American workforce and about how most people change careers something like eight times in their lives. There’s an actual statistic about that. The problem with statistics is that they hardly ever tell the whole story. And another part of the story is that if you grow up in a factory town, if in fact there is a factory town to still grow up in, chances are good that multiple generations of your family have worked there. It’s not nepotism, per say. Well, it is. But the term “nepo baby” only applies to the children of the rich and famous, not to the kids of blue collar fathers and mothers who work long shifts six days a week to get two weeks vacation a year and Sundays off because factory towns are also sometimes church towns.
Dan Denton’s new book is the sort of manual new hires at any factory job should get on the first day of their first shift, except that HR would never let it happen because they worry no one would stay on the line
As the novel unfolds and our protagonist moves through the years, we find that a lot happens even when it looks like nothing at all is happening. Like the fish he goes to the lake to catch and release, most of his life is under the surface. That’s not to say we get any didactic meditations, grand social theories not-so-cleverly masked as fiction. Denton’s style here is bare-boned and descriptive. Conversations are punctuations on thoughts and feelings the other characters understand but don’t express.
The true beauty of Denton’s novel is that it doesn’t try. It doesn’t have to try. Through our nameless protagonist, we read about the changes in work culture, in generational diaspora, and in relationships. He’s just moving through the world, working his way to retirement, and finding his way to something like happy that looks very different from the happy that was sold to him when he first got his union card. This book is neither an indictment nor is an anthem of the blue collar backbone that still holds this broken economy together. This book is an unapologetic exploration of what happens everyday to people who aren’t counted, aren’t considered, and aren’t respected enough to even be included in the statistical data set.
– Mick Parsons