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A growing body of American literature examines the conditions in towns from the Midwest to the Northeast that have been drastically affected by the condition of what has been termed “deindustrialization”. These towns have witnessed the employee downsizing and the eventual collapse of their major industries, such as automobile manufacturing and coal mining, and the fiction about them—termed “deindustrialization literature” by Sherry Lee Linkon—explores how the affected generations cope with these changed circumstances. The novel Coal Run, written in 2004 by Tawni O’Dell’s, herself a native of a coal mining region in Western Pennsylvania, is one such example of deindustrialization literature and the focus of this essay. Set in a coal mining town that has been shut down because of a Centralia-like uncontrolled mine fire that opens fissures to a literal kind of hell, the protagonist, Ivan the Great, a former Penn State football star, and other characters attempt to re-orient themselves after the mine—described by Ivan as “the closest thing I had to God”—closes and the effects of that closing are felt. This paper discusses the motifs of ecological ruin, economic disruption, and personal, familial, and community disorientation in the novel. In doing so, the paper considers connections between de- or post-industrialization and postmodernism, particularly as discussed by cultural geographer David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity in terms of “the crisis tendency” of capitalism toward “overaccumulation” and the “link between postmodernism and…more flexible modes of capital accumulation”. The paper goes on to consider the experiences through which the novel’s characters learn to look to the future in ways that may be said to coincide with the ethos of much postmodern American fiction that sets less ambitious but nonetheless still meaningful expectations for human being.

“The Closest Thing to God”: Post-industrialization and Postmodernism in Tawni O’Dell’s Coal Run