Scrapper

A Novel

By: Matt Bell

Narrated by: David Chandler

Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

For fans of The Dog Stars and Station Eleven, Scrapper uses the real-life dystopia of a devastated Detroit as a backdrop for one man's desperate quest for justice and redemptive grace.

In the wake of tragedy, ex-boxer Kelly returns to Detroit after years in the South. Unable to find work, he scavenges for scrap metal in the hundred thousand abandoned buildings at the heart of the city, an area he calls "the zone", where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he's come to steal: a kidnapped boy handcuffed to a bed, crying out for rescue. After being celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly decides to avenge the boy's unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, unearthing long-buried cycles of trauma and cruelty, memories made dangerous again.

©2015 Matt Bell (P)2015 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Somber, incantatory sentences to hold you within [Bell's] dreamlike creation.... This unique book leaves you with the haunting lesson that even if you renounce and cast away your loved ones, you can never disown the memory of your deeds." ( The Wall Street Journal)

"A gripping, grisly tale of a husband's descent into and ultimate emergence from some kind of personal hell." ( The New York Times)

"Bell's novel isn't just a joy to read, it's also one of the smartest meditations on the subjects of love, family and marriage in recent years." ( NPR)

All damage has a beginning.

"You couldn’t escape the past but he hoped you could choose what to restore, what to keep gleaming. This was the progress Kelly had seen, not the replacing of the old city with the new but the building of smarter exits and bypasses."
-- Matt Bell, Scrapper

Matt Bell's 2015 novel Scrapper is the second of Matt's novels I've read. When I read him, I get elements of Cormac McCarthy, Brian Evenson, Don DeLillo, Vollmann, and (it took me awhile to put my finger on it) Gertrude Stein (maybe? perhaps?).

Scrapper centers on a man, Kelly, trapped between the things that haunt him in the past and his crumbling, decaying present. This felt very Dystopian to me, but the further I waded into Bell's story, the more I had the feeling that not recognizing a landscape doesn't mean the zone doesn't exist, doesn't mean the disaster isn't inevitable even for the privileged, even for those currently at the top of the heap. The clock ticks for us all and sooner or later it stops ticking forever.

There is a physicality to the book, both in setting and characters. The story starts in Detroit and a crumpling Detroit is the centerpiece of the novel. The character is bouncing between redemption and destruction. Interspersed are two separate short-stories that seem in the beginning not related to the narrative structure of the book, but once the veil of the story lifts a bit, you realize these two stories are keys that unlock the theme a bit more. Two twisted, rusted I-beams that give a distinct shape to the broken concrete and the web of rebar that give it all shape and direction. They are two foreign bodies that don't seem to belong, but once we pan back, we see the broken car located in the house is part of a greater entropy from an explosion or wreck.

All damage has a beginning. All narratives begin with a blank slate.

Tracking not exactly directly backwards in Matt's fiction, it appears from the two points I know (Scrapper and Appleseed), there are threads running through Matt's fiction. Environmental disaster, decay, loneliness and redemption are all there.

A warning, and I'll end this with the warning -- This book is not for the faint-hearted. It reminded me a bit of McCarthy's The Road, Evenson's Immobility, and the prose rang like DeLillo and Stein. It is hard. It is horror, both in landscape and intent. There are no superheroes in this story. No medals. But there is a payoff.