“A physical shock like COVID-19 is,” Bill McKibben wrote in the New Yorker in March, “a reminder that the world is a physical place. That’s easy to forget when we apprehend it mostly through screens, or through the cozy, contained environments that make up most of our lives.”
Should the New Yorker’s readership (or anyone else, for that matter) need a reminder that many don’t have the luxury of working in such “cozy, contained environments,” that some are better acquainted with welding screens than iPhone screens, Eliese Colette Goldbach’s Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit is a splash of cold water. Make that molten zinc.
Rust tracks a young woman’s vertiginous course correction from liberal arts education to a Vulcan realm of high heat, hard hats, and harrowing physical labor: a Cleveland steel mill. In the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Studs Terkel’s Working, Molly Martin’s Hard-Hatted Women, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Rust grants readers an instructive and chastening look at some of the labor on which we depend without understanding or appreciating it.
When Goldbach, cash-strapped and struggling with bipolar disorder, begins work at the mill on the banks of the Cuyahoga—she is assigned a number, #6691—she is met by beckoning smokestacks and buildings “the blackish-red color of dried blood.” Though enviably remunerative, it is for her very much a job of last resort. Old-timers rehearse grisly tales of accidents and deaths: “Get it off me,” begged a woman pinned by a steel cylinder. “When they finally got that steel off her . . . her body just fell apart.”
The mill is an inferno of blast furnaces and molten metal (for hot-dip galvanization), train cars and gantry cranes (for moving pieces of steel the weight of a half-dozen SUVs), and temperatures the mind can scarcely comprehend. Surely, Joseph Heller would appreciate the coal-black comedy of a safety harness that the veteran workers disdain to wear on the grounds that if needed, it would only prevent death from coming quickly enough.
Here, one of the vanishingly few women in an environment as crude and sexist as it is hazardous, Goldbach sets out to forge an identity—in the smithy of her soul, she might add, having come to this directly from a program in English literature. (She is credentialed in all but the most technical sense; a bureaucratic snafu plus depressive inertia means that she has an education but not a degree.)
Rust, it turns out, is less concerned with how steel is produced (though it does supply a piecemeal introductory course) than with how the interplay of work, place, family, religion, culture, and adversity produce an individual. When a job is unglamorous, difficult, or dangerous enough that most people avoid it, odds are that the path that leads to it hasn’t exactly been paved with ice cream cake.
Goldbach’s upbringing sounds to have been mostly happy but experienced under high emotional tension. Her middle-ish-class parents, a pawnshop manager and a dental hygienist, raised her to be unswervingly Catholic, Republican, and proud of Cleveland.
These priors will be tested, at times violently, against a burgeoning awareness of the larger world and a snowballing accumulation of experience—most brutally, a rape and its aftermath coupled with worsening bipolar depression. Goldbach gives an account of what the godless will be pleased to interpret as a childhood religious mania (she dreamed of being a nun and sought palpable signs from the Virgin Mary) as well as a framework of what she regards as naive political views.
Rust is a valuable meditation on feeling simultaneously ashamed and defensive of where one is from: not only the place, Cleveland, but the milieu of casual male chauvinism (“you’re too pretty for this job”) and low-information Trumpism. Goldbach repeatedly recalls an episode in which she is humiliated by two lawyers in a bar for working in a mill. By the end, she knows just what she would have told them: We make steel, and without it, the rest of the country would have no backbone, literally or figuratively speaking.
What emerges, buttressed by a capsule history of labor (e.g., the bloody Little Steel Strike of 1937) and a biographical sketch of Cleveland, is an insistent feeling that without the grim endurance of the laborers in whose bootprints Goldbach follows, we would have no useful model of how to tackle large-scale challenges. Goldbach’s boyfriend (who tries to accept her long hours, strict schedule, exhaustion, irritability, psychiatric episodes, and even a car accident) and their precarious relationship are hard to root for: All he seems to do is practice ukelele.
All that said, it can be hard to root for Goldbach too. She wants to have her cake and eat it—to lay claim to the resilience and grit of the Cleveland steelworker while subtly and less subtly treating those around her like scrap. Her apt-pupil eagerness to ingratiate herself to, and validate the prejudices of, the cultural gatekeepers who will review her book can be embarrassing. Too often, a compelling tableau of mill life segues into a college essay point, in clanking prose, about how Goldbach has learned to see the world like a typical liberal college professor, which is what she will ultimately succeed in becoming.
The men and women around Goldbach, tough customers with nicknames such as Sleepy Bear and Dynamo, are drawn sympathetically. Yet they struggle to come alive in Goldbach’s wooden dialogue, which does more to depict them as archetypes of benighted red staters than it does to flesh them out as human beings.
Goldbach writes that she had “assumed that [the sneering lawyers] reduced me to a stereotype, so [she] did the same to them.” She could have gone further, showing that her coworkers, unreconstructed and “problematic” though they may be, are largely more sinned against than sinning. When she discovers a magazine called the New Yorker and feels an intellectual appetite crying out to be met, the reader can only pray that when the ink is dry on her approving reviews, she won’t forget where she came from.