Nick Rees Gardner’s third book (So Marvelously Far, 2019 and Hurricane Trinity, 2023) is a linked story collection focusing on the fictional Westinghouse, Ohio. Right away, I was drawn to see Gardner’s world in connection with Sherwood Anderson’s linked stories in Winesburg, Ohio, and Gardner’s Delinquents didn’t disappoint.  As the opening pages make clear, this Rust Belt collection is about a very different America than Anderson wrote about in Winesburg. They’re trapped; they’re often addicts; they’re seeking a means to escape Westinghouse; they’re looking to find love, meaning, connection, and some shred of satisfaction.  Time passes or it doesn’t in Westinghouse, as the book points out. Too often, the characters struggle just to make it another day. 

I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered: Oxycontin, Xanax, blunts, and booze. My goal was to write a book about middle America during the opioid epidemic. I ran cars full of dope boys with fake MRIs from Ohio to Florida, where we picked up prescriptions of painkillers from the Fort Lauderdale pill mills to snort and shoot and sell back in Hillbilly Oz. It was immersive research, the kid people sometimes don’t come back from.

Gardner pulls back the curtain to his Hillbilly Oz with a beautiful map in the opening pages, which shows how this world takes shape, south of Lake Erie and Cleveland. The names of the places haunt and fascinate: Dad Bod Brewing, Rust’s Recks, Scusi’s Wine Cellar, and Church of Future Souls.  As outlined in successive sections in a story like “Spit Backs,” Westinghouse is a place of recovery, relapse, withdrawal, overdose, and occasional blurring of states in-between. 

Gardner’s characters struggle against personal demons, frayed relationships, and lost opportunities.  In “Lifers, Locals, Hangers-on” Lissa wonders why a Cowboy has captured her attention as she sees her town has become a “snowy ghost town.”  In “Psychedelicious” a narrator opens and works a food truck with his best friend Allen, only to realize that the angels and demons at play in the story will present him a vision of a destructive end. In “Digging” our narrator Neil watches a house burn with his boyfriend Tucker, only to see the relationship lost in Tucker’s obsession with the past and inability to commit to love in the present moment.  One line from that story seems fitting for so much of Delinquents: 

I ran past the demolished house, now a vacant lot, all the ashes and rubble hauled away and a fresh stubble of new grass poking through the straw. I stopped, backtracked. A swath of stalks had been kicked away and there were paw prints in the mud.

I smiled.

I ran.

I slipped into a daydream where I kept on running, out of town, over the train tracks, to the interstate and beyond. I broke through some barrier and left it all behind.

This is the magic behind the curtain of Gardner’s stories.  He presents characters who are often broken and haunted, and yet they exhibit a resilience and determination to plow on, look deeply, and try to breakthrough to understanding.  Gardner’s world alludes to a simpler, older Ohio world, as created by Anderson in Winesburg, but he transforms it into an opioid-infused, alcohol-doused, time-ravaged Ohio of rust, ruin, relapse, and recovery. I found links to Denis Johnson, Morgan Talty, Tommy Orange, and others in Delinquents.  

At its core, Delinquents draws attention to the ravages of “flyover” towns like Westinghouse across the Rust Belt.  This opening paragraph from the novella “Captain Failure” is a good spot to finish with:

The heart of Ohio had been rubbled before. A landscape lathered by glaciers, bunched into hills and a sprawl of moraines regrown with maple, sycamore, and hemlock only to be stripped again and plowed to farmland, edged with walls of Ice Age granite chucked from the furrows cut in the loam.  Then, the buildings of Westinghouse struggled skyward only to stagger through recessions, deindustrialization till the brickwork collapsed. A new landscape of storefronts gone blank, old factories devoured by vines and heavy rains whose runoff sunk to the creek and flowed away.

 It’s here in the beauty of the natural description, and the rugged determination of this town and its characters to rebuild or run away which gives Delinquents its inner strength and courage to flow-on and fight for themselves. Each of these stories connects us to a dark, often-dysfunctional space, which seeks an escape into something more. 

Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts
by Nick Rees Gardner
Madrona Books; 196 p. 

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