The All-American Industrial Motel
By Doug Crandell, Chicago Review Press, 2007

      Doug Crandell’s memoir of a hot summer spent working at the Celotex ceiling tile factory in Lagro, Indiana is an attempt by the author to reconcile his conflicting feelings about his father, a distant man who provided little in the way of nurturing and emotional support. Crandell reaches further as well, as he tries to capture the strange fraternity of the working-class Midwest, in which a myriad of odd masculine behaviors stand in for expressions of affection.

      Crandell grew up in Wabash, and his father worked for decades in the large ceiling tile manufacturer in Lagro. His father dreamed of his boy becoming a star basketball player at Indiana University, but Crandell was more intellectual than athletic. His crowning achievement was attending Ball State University rather than IU, majoring in psychology rather than reeling in a basketball scholarship. His father’s disappointment, while apparently rarely expressed, was palpable to Crandell nonetheless. Even if Crandell is the first in his family to go to college, he can’t help but feel that he has failed them somehow.

      By the time that Crandell reaches the final summer of his college career, his father is still at Celotex, and his mother has taken a job at Arby’s where she embarrasses her teenage co-workers with her enthusiasm. With just one summer course standing between him and a degree, Crandell returns to Wabash to work in the Celotex factory beside his father. One last chance to bond with the old man, he thinks – an opportunity for the two of them to finally understand one another.

      Of course, it doesn’t work out that way. Crandell rarely sees his father at the factory, and when their paths do cross his father barely gives him the time of day. Instead, Crandell finds a surrogate father figure, Jerry, a man he’s known since he was a boy but only now comes to respect. Jerry, for his part, takes Crandell under his wing by providing the drugs that help Crandell endure the grueling pace of double shifts and a long commute to school.

      The summer is a distorted haze of stimulants, asbestos, death, unsettling discoveries, disasters and near-disasters. Crandell teeters on the edge of becoming a college dropout, a lifer who comes to Celotex for the summer and stays for the rest of his days. It is a harrowing season, described by Crandell with sinister fervor.

      There are aspects of Crandell’s memoir that strain credibility. One would think, given the James Frey Million Little Pieces fiasco, authors would be reluctant to fictionalize any part of their autobiographies, and for that reason I’ll give Crandell the benefit of the doubt and assume that everything in his book is more or less accurate. But when a co-worker in the Celotex factory cavorts through the book pretending he’s a dog, my goodwill begins to wear a bit thin. And when Crandell’s mother spends most of the book dressed in costumes representing Looney Tunes characters and referring to herself consistently in the third person, I almost suspect that I’m being duped.

      What Crandell produces with these fantastic touches – whether they are real, imagined or embellished – is exactly what non-Midwesterners want to see in a memoir of the Midwest: eccentric characters with hearts of gold who are provincial but hard-working, narrow-minded but well meaning. It’s every movie about small-town America you’ve ever seen.

      But Crandell’s book rises above all that. He follows in the footsteps of other young Midwestern writers – Haven Kimmel and Michael Perry are two excellent examples that come immediately to mind – in creating a vision of the Midwest that is uncompromisingly smart and sophisticated, yet entirely true to the middle-of-the-country soil that spawned it. Not as whimsical as Kimmel or as insightful as Perry, Crandell is regardless acutely aware of what growing up in Indiana has made of him, and how his enduring identity as a Midwesterner (no matter where he lives) affects the way he views the rest of the world – and he writes about it all with honesty and competence.

      Ostensibly a book about the relationship between a man and his father, Industrial Motel is more about the relationship between an intelligent man and small-town Indiana; the schism that divides Crandell and his parents is a microcosm of the chasm between the author and his hometown. More importantly, Crandell knows that bridge burning is inevitable once the chasm has been crossed. “Maybe only the kids of parents who never went to college, who didn’t get their chance for the life they dreamed of would understand,” Crandell explains as he contemplates leaving Wabash for Indianapolis, “but if I could use one word to describe what I was doing, it would be betrayal. Once you leave your family and go another way, there’s no turning back, even if you feel damned forever for doing it.”

      I suspect that Crandell’s guilt-ridden aspirations are more common than he thinks, and one doesn’t even have to stray too far from home to feel that the road to independence is paved with one betrayal after another. But as he strives to understand and be understood, Crandell repays his family double what they’ve given him, even if they don’t recognize the currency he uses.

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