It wasn't apparent to anyone for the longest time that Baltimore author Philipp Meyer had hopped the freight train to success - just like the protagonist of his acclaimed debut novel, American Rust. Every time Meyer's line of boxcars seemed to be chugging along the straight and narrow, it would suddenly grind to a halt and shift into reverse.
For starters, despite a stratospheric IQ, Meyer dropped out of City College at age 16. After three tries, he elbowed his way into prestigious Cornell University. After graduating, Meyer worked as a trader on Wall Street and made piles of money before deciding that he wasn't cut out for a life of empty materialism. So he quit, moved into the basement of his parents' home, and picked up odd jobs in construction. Then, Meyer, who had been writing seriously since college, sold his first novel for $400,000.
The miracle isn't that Meyer survived. It's that his stouthearted parents, Eugene and Rita Meyer of Baltimore, made it through those hairpin twists and turns alongside their son without losing their dinner.
"My parents were amazingly supportive," says Meyer, 34. "My friends thought I was deluded."
Tomorrow, Meyer will read from his novel in a bookstore a few miles from the Hampden home in which he grew up. American Rust tells the story of two high school friends living in a depressed steel town: the slight, cerebral Isaac English and Billy Poe, a former football star with a hair-trigger temper. When Isaac tries to leave home, he and Billy have an encounter with three homeless men that turns violent. Things proceed from bad to worse, and the harder the friends struggle to escape, the more they are trapped.
Meyer has been compared to such famous writers as John Steinbeck, Richard Russo and, in a review in today's Baltimore Sun, William Faulkner.
Though the novel is set in Pennsylvania, Meyer drew on his Baltimore upbringing for elements of his story.
For instance, in the early 1980s, a man was nearly murdered in front of Meyer's home.
"It turned out that he had been shot by a guy in a bar who was protecting his friend," Meyer says - a turn of events echoed in the novel.
"He died in prison," Meyer says, who now lives outside Ithaca, N.Y. "That was when I began to think about how an awful choice becomes the best choice someone can make. "
And it was in Hampden that Meyer realized that appearances can be deceiving.
