Is Love Enough to Save a City? - The New York Times

CHEVY IN THE HOLE
By Kelsey Ronan

There is a particular kind of melancholy endemic to cities in the industrial Midwest. It’s not the prevalent emotion or the dominant vibe of the region, but there’s no gloom quite like Rust Belt gloom. (Being from southeast Michigan, I owe much of my own literary imagination to this particular feeling.) It contains a strange blend of community pride and civic disappointment, the feeling of existing in a time and place that has enormous potential but is repeatedly bogged down in a lack of resources, the corrupted power wielded by a few criminal politicians, and the mythology of a better time, a time when the work was good. It’s the kind of gloom that shapes you if you grow up there: It tempers optimism about political movements, instills distrust of government and corporate authority, and sometimes limits the ideas of what’s considered possible for your own life.

“Chevy in the Hole,” the debut novel from Kelsey Ronan, does a wonderful job of capturing this kind of melancholy, in particular the melancholy of Flint, Mich., where August (Gus), who’s recovering from an opioid addiction, falls in love with Monae, a hard-working activist, just as the Flint water crisis comes to light.

It’s Gus who anchors this novel, as Ronan adeptly dramatizes one of the most dangerous monsters of addiction: self-loathing. We meet Gus as Narcan brings him back to life in the bathroom of the Detroit farm-to-table restaurant where he works; it’s an intriguing resurrection moment, and Gus is grateful for the second chance but is also, deep down, convinced that he doesn’t deserve his good fortune. In what feels like an attempt to add some worth to his sense of self, he volunteers at a local environmental organization in Flint, where he meets Monae, whose grounded, practical skills and active engagement with her community strike Gus as almost magical. He has spent a great deal of his life in his own head, hating himself. Monae is a wonder to him. She gets things done.

And so, this becomes a love story between opposites: Gus’s ambitions are limited and vague; Monae’s are focused and intense. Gus is a white man and Monae is a Black woman, which gives them completely different perspectives on and experiences with life in deeply segregated southeast Michigan. For a while, we wonder what Gus has that Monae wants: He’s not particularly charming, nor particularly promising, but there’s a lovelorn grit about him and Ronan’s intimately close third-person narrative ultimately gives us a glimpse of what might be lovable about Gus. He’s thoughtful in every sense of the word — he’s kind and he thinks too much, and Ronan has a gift for propulsive sentences that make even his deeply interior moments somehow suspenseful and endearing.

Late in the novel, Monae offers her philosophy on love, which sheds light on why, perhaps, Gus appeals to her: “I think you decide on someone and somewhere and the devotion is the sense it all makes. You choose someone and you try your best for them. That’s the way I love you. That’s the way I love this place.”

This passage reflects the novel’s central question: Does relentless commitment always yield positive results? Monae seems committed to what others see as lost causes, namely Gus, and the city of Flint. It’s lonely work, this kind of commitment, and the sections of the novel from Monae’s point of view tend to reflect that loneliness. In contrast to Gus’s heart-on-his-sleeve emotion, Monae feels somewhat inscrutable; her point of view is grounded mostly in the five senses of the present moment. Still, they form a relationship based on something subtly beautiful, an unspoken but profound understanding of a particular kind of loneliness they both share. Thus, the main propulsive engine of the novel becomes a question that often applies to relationships as much as it applies to stories about America’s forgotten and marginalized landscapes: Can we save them with love, or will they simply collapse?

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