The End of the American Dream?

 I've read a couple of books recently which are set in American towns which have lost their way; where the optimism that has for so long seemed a hall mark of the USA has been replaced by pessimism and despair. 

The narrator-protagonist of Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland is the son of hippy parents who has rejected their way of life. He has ambition: it is to become an entrepreneur. And yet he lives in a West Coast town whose nuclear power plant that was its raison d'etre has closed; his grandparents have lost their life savings; the man after whose family the town is named lives alone but for his pets. In one paragraph he contrasts the shopping mall of his childhood with how it is now: 

"The Ridgecrest Mall was where my friends and I, all of us hyper from sugar and too many video games, feeling fizzy and unreal - like products that can't exist without advertising - shunted about in our packs: skatepunks, deathcookies, jocks, psueds, Euros, and geeks. ... I'm almost too old for malljamming now, and to be hoest, there's not much mall left to malljam in. Today around us I see wounded shoe stores, dead pizzerias, plywooded phone marts, and decayed and locked-up sports stores."

The mother of the narrator-protagonist of The Lovely Moon by Alice Sebold lives in an American suburb at the end of its life, filled with old people at the end of theirs. This town also has had a major industry closed down. It is a bleak portrait of failure and waste and futility.

I wondered whether there are any other books like this and thought of:

• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt in which the narrator-protagonist spends some of his youth in a suburb of Los Angeles where most of the house are unfinished and the road peters out into desert.
• Paper Towns by John Green in which the narrator hides in an abandoned shopping centre.

Of course there are European equivalents. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is a bleak portrait of a Glasgow suburb whose pit has closed.  In Carry Me Down by M J Hyland the narrator spends part of his boyhood in a dreadful Dublin block of flats. The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan is a series of stories set in an Ireland following the economic crash of 2008. But somehow these have less impact because the European zeitgeist is not so wildly optimistic as the American dream.

In an update to this post, I have recently read (and been incredibly impressed by) Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, set in rural Virginia, a place suffering from the demise of the mining industry and beset by opioid addiction.

Dave Appleby, author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God