John Sayles Yellow Earth: Review

 

For this year’s  Reading Independent Publishers Month call, I read John Sayles Yellow Earth published by Haymarket Books. According to their website “Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.” A laudable mission, one after my own heart.

It is not surprising that Yellow Earth is part of their catalog. John Sayles used to be an indie small budget filmmaker and, one of my favorite directors. He came into prominence in the 80s with Matewan, Eight Men Out, Lone Star, Passion Fish, Sunshine State and The Secret of Ron Inish. His movies were critically acclaimed even if they did not make much money. Certain common themes run through all his movies: rapacity of capitalism; corruption in its institutions; exploitation of labor; class conflicts; struggles of working men and women; toxic racial bigotry; environmental destruction. Along with moviemaking, he has been building a parallel career track in fiction writing, which address on a more panoramic scale, many of the themes in his films—they are like big budget films on paper. Several of his novels are historical fiction with a handful of big characters whose stories stretch over several decades. Yellow Earth is not a decades-spanning historical fiction. It is very much a twenty-first century American story; all its action are compressed within a year; there are great many characters, all memorably written, but no single character is dominant. It is sweeping in scope with just one force driving the story—shale oil.

The novel, set in North Dakota (nicknamed Peace Garden State, why I don’t know), is divided into four sections—Exploration, Stimulation, Extraction and Absquatulation (which means leaving suddenly). North Dakota is about to experience massive oil boom with the advent of a sophisticated technology that uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extract oil from the Bakken Formation, a massive subsurface source rock for oil (about 4 billion barrels). Lots of oil and, with oil selling at $104 dollars per barrel, lots of money. 

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When the novel begins, we are introduced to many characters—they catch your attention even if you don’t always remember their names. They are functionaries exploring the lay of the land—a salesman selling oil leases to property owners with mineral rights; a biologist monitoring a large colony of prairie dogs (which will be systematically exterminated to facilitate the laying of the pipeline); a geologist preparing his mineral survey report; a sheriff worried about the flood of outsiders coming into the town bringing with them crime, drugs and prostitution; a well meaning but misguided head of the tribal council wanting to make sure that his people are not cheated out of the spoils of the boom; a veteran of many boomtowns setting up a dive bar, a lap dancer looking to make good money in short time and, finally the residents of Yellow Earth and the Three Nations Reservation, many of whom have lands that sit atop a substantial chunk of Bakken. 

Sayles spends more time with some characters than others—he takes us on an entertaining long ride following the salesman as he glibly manipulates the landowners into signing the leases for oil extraction.

                          “I’m starting at fifty an acre,” he tells her. 

She laughs. “It’s not your money, Sig.” 

“They hire me cause I’m careful with it.” 

“If this rock pays anything like what they hope,” says Ginny, “careful is out the window.”

 “Anybody can wrap up a lease if they throw enough money at it,” says Sig. “To do it and maintain your company’s economic advantage requires a salesman.”

Stories of men who make the longest journey—the trucker who hauls drilling machinery from Houston to Yellow Earth, a journey of 1300 miles, all the time terrified that a piece of the machinery will fall off on the road and kill people in the cars behind or the illegal immigrant crossing from Mexico all the way to Yellow Earth, only to find that he has come a little late to the party—are the most poignant. This is not a story about oil barons, corporate bigwigs,  hotshot lawyers or powerful politicians. This is about people on the ground, cogs in the wheel—salesmen, long-haul truckers, drillers, mechanics, bartenders, lap dancers, bouncers—journeymen who have come to town to earn a living hoping that  drilling would go on for a long time but suspecting that it may not. This is also about the people of Yellow Earth and Three Nations Reservation—those who profit from the ownership of mineral rights and those who are made to bear the physical, environmental and social costs of fracking. (Actually, everyone bears the costs but for some the deal is sweetened by the monthly checks they get from the oil company.) 

If extractive capitalism is indifferent to the lives of the ordinary people who make its massive profits possible, Yellow Earth is not. Its pages are populated by many small characters sketched with care and empathy. When boom turns bust and they leave bruised and battered (some don’t, they die) we come to care about them too. 

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