TO THE MILL AND BACK

In Savage’s novella, a textile mill offers hope and hardship to those looking to make a quick buck.

This three-part work opens in 1948 with 17-year-old Floyd hoping to find a summer job. Blake Silk Mill offers him work as a “bobbin boy,” monotonously cleaning empty spools of yarn. His colleagues George Klumpfer and Maggie O’Hara attempt “to demonize, demoralize and disturb him,” because they see him as their inferior. Floyd leaves the mill to serve in Korea but returns after his tour of duty. A twist of fate leads him to become the protégé of “the chemist,” a man who trains him for a new role as “tester” in which he’ll be subordinate to no one. Book 2 opens in 1971, with 16-year-old Chris Tiller looking for work at what is now Blake Textile Mill; he, too, works as a bobbin boy. George is now a spiteful superintendent and Maggie a poisonous “floorlady.” Book 3 revisits the mill in 2001, charting the decline of the industry and its employees’ faltering dreams. Savage’s novella smartly and succinctly captures the power of mid-20th-century American industry as Floyd marvels at the seemingly inexorable might of the mill: “a symphony of auditory revolutions that made the boy wonder if every gosh-darned factory on the East Coast had somehow had its sound piped into the hallways of this five-story roar-a-torium!” As the novella progresses, this sense of might is replaced by a lingering one of impermanence, as when Chris is told that “these places are all gonna be empty before too long.” Savage has a laconic writing style but regularly entertains with his unique descriptive approach: “The freight elevator moved as if it was being pushed by a couple of dying elephants.” However, the novella feels considerably underdeveloped; Floyd’s war years, for instance, are dealt with in just a few sentences, offering no satisfying sense of how they affected him. That said, this is largely a thoughtful tale that evocatively describes the American manufacturing peak and decline on a deeply human level.

An intriguing, if overly brief, story of a workplace and its workers.