On this Lit Show, Nick Reding discusses Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, a study of methamphetamine’s road from legal stimulant to pervasive illicit drug. With Oelwein, Iowa, as its epicenter, the book chronicles the widely variegated effects of meth’s production, use, and distribution on communities throughout the rural United States.
Reding stumbled onto the subject for his book almost accidentally, while on other journalistic assignments. As he made inroads into communities from Idaho to Missouri, he found that each setting, despite regional differences, had something in common: meth. In each of half a dozen distinct cities, the drug had woven its way into the fabric of daily life. Reding felt increasingly sure that he’d uncovered a major story—a national epidemic that was ravaging communities, families, and individual lives. Still, the author found he simply couldn’t convince editors on either coast that the problems he described were real. Their responses were maddeningly uniform: no one is talking about meth. It’s a fringe, rural problem. Sorry, but no one’s looking to read about this. Our nation, as could be judged by its silence on the issue, apparently agreed.
With Methland, Reding seeks to demonstrate that greater forces–national, even global trends–not just individual choices, are driving meth addiction countrywide; that individuals caught within the drug’s destructive circle of influence are normal, everyday, and usually very hard-working people; that meth, as an epidemic, is a side effect of the confluence of challenges facing small-town America. In these goals, the book is a resounding success. Americans, rural and urban, are lucky that someone took a chance on this book. Reding’s canny, humane analysis demonstrates that methamphetamine, far from being a fringe issue, is actually at the heart of who we are and how we live as Americans. It is the rare book that convinces us its topic is the salient lens through which to view our cultural moment.
Complete Interview:
Methland was one of the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2009, and it won the 2009 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. The book was picked as a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Times.
Excerpt from the New York Times Book Review:
“[Methland], wrought from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of a type that’s disappearing faster than nonfranchised lunch counters on Main Street, isn’t chiefly a tale of drugs and crime, of dysfunction and despair, but a recession-era tragedy scaled for an “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder stage and seemingly based on a script by William S. Burroughs. The madness stalking tiny, defenseless Oelwein may eventually come for all of us, we learn, and once again, as happens in America whenever our collective attention wanders from the gray struggles of the little guy to the purple capers of the big wheels, attention must be paid. Right now. Or else.”
Excerpt—Nick Reding reads from Methland‘s new afterword:
