Truth and Beauty in the Rust Belt

Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters From The Rust Belt. By Carlo Rotella. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 293 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

LIKE CARLO ROTELLA, AND PRESUMABLY LIKE MANY AMERICAN STUDIES SCHOLARS who come from families steeped in traditions of artisanal handwork and blue-collar laboring, I often think about how my career as a symbolic analyst—working most of my daily shift in the digital ether with words and ideas, whereas my father, a welder, worked with fire and metals, and my mother, a seamstress, with needle and fabric—might represent something significant about transformations in postindustrial American culture. When rapt in such thought, I invariably remember a brief conversation with my late Uncle Abbey, a thick-chested bull of a man who ran a construction company in northern New Jersey. His father—my maternal grandfather—was an Italian immigrant who had worked a variety of jobs in the building trades, including laying brick for bakery and pizzeria ovens. These men showed affection in the same way that they plied their trades: through headlocks, bicep fondling, and shadow boxing with hands made strong by years and years of hammering and troweling. (How strong? One time—this is a true story—Abbey was driving a rented Fiat full of relatives down a mountain in northern Italy when suddenly the brakes gave out. To stop the runaway vehicle, he reached out and grabbed a tree, shattering his left hand and arm but bringing the Fiat to heel.) Shortly after I started graduate school, Abbey asked me what I was studying. American studies, I told him, offering one of those lame, dissembling explanations of what that actually is. "American studies?" he responded quizzically, "Is there any money in that?"

It took me a few years to appreciate the profundity of the question. For behind it, I now think, lies much more than a utilitarian calculation of my earning potential. It's a question—if I may now embroider a bit—that points to a set of larger issues: Does the meaning of work change as the character of work changes? What happens to places—to cities and towns, their neighborhoods, institutions, and landscapes—in the face of economic transformations that displace one set of techniques and skills in favor of another? What kind of cultural forms and practices emerge in response to these transformations? What stories do people tell about the old days in an effort to make sense of the new conditions wrought by these transformations? What happens to gender codes when men—here I'm imagining Abbey's question as the verbal equivalent of a bicep-squeezing to determine if I was man enough to support a family—are no longer necessarily the standard-bearers of traditional models of blue-collar toughness?

These are the kinds of questions that Carlo Rotella raises in Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt, a work of serious academic cultural analysis whose every beautifully crafted sentence carries the imprint of his Sicilian paternal grandmother's sewing thimble and the melodious ring of his Catalan maternal grandfather's violin. Rotella is a storyteller of surpassing talent, and the key to great story-telling is finding great characters. Inspired by his family history of skilled handwork in needlepoint, carpentry, and musical strings, and consumed by his own idiosyncratic search for truth and beauty in the postindustrial ruins of the Rust Belt, Rotella brings together a seemingly disparate group of contemporary characters whose work practices, leisure pursuits, and cultural affinities help illuminate some of the major transformations in turn-of-the-millennium American culture. We meet Liz McGonigal, a psychology graduate student from a middle-class suburb of Erie, Pennsylvania, who spends her leisure time in the Lower East Side Boxing Club of that classic manufacturing city, honing the pugilist skills that have earned her regional and national titles in the burgeoning field of women's boxing...