Fabrication : Essays on making things and making meaning

Rating:
Summary: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning
Review: Susan Neville, an English professor at Butler University, has received literary awards for her short fiction and essays. "Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning" is a collection of related essays, most new, but some previously published. I read the essays in order, but the reader is free to skip around.

I was surprised that Neville's factories were largely located in small towns in Indiana and not restricted to industrialized areas like Gary and Indianapolis. I was raised in Indiana, attended Purdue and Indiana University, was familiar with many of the small towns, and yet I had no inkling of these hidden manufacturing enterprises. I learned that the world class steel mill in the town of Crawfordsville is to the larger steels mills in Gary as a laptop is to an old mainframe. Little Edinburgh calls itself the veneer capital of the world. The man who perfected piston rings and invented cruise control lived his life in sleepy Hagerstown.

I read "Fabrication" while I was also reading Primo Levi's extraordinary work, "The Periodic Table", and I may have unfairly held Susan Neville to an exceptionally high standard. Neville looks for meaning in the context of factory tours in Indiana while Levi writes about himself, a chemist that was a Jew living in Mussolini's Italy. We learn from Levi much about chemistry and how a chemist tackles problems, but we even learn more about Levi himself, about life in a Fascist state, and about human relationships in difficult situations. Susan Neville's essays, while successful in their intriguing descriptions of how things are made, are less so in the examination of "making meaning".

I enjoyed Neville's descriptions of small factories, the manufacturing processes, and the workers themselves. She examined how these factories came to be and how they fit into a world of increasing globalization. Not all tours are equally interesting, but she does make a good tour guide.

I was less comfortable with her search for meaning. A few essays seemed a bit flat, but I found others insightful and intriguing. I particularly like "Veneer" with its surprising links to Primo Levi. "Smoke" was quite good with its look at the dying tobacco farming tradition along the Ohio. Neville's Silicon Valley analogy in "Carboys", the story of the automotive invention in the Midwest in the last century, made me wonder why I had never quite realized how exciting and creative those early decades must have been.

Will you like Susan Neville's style? I suggest that you take a look (see ... reviews) at her book, "Twilight in Arcadia", published by Indiana Historical Society Press. These excerpts are included in "Fabrication" as the essay titled "Smoke" and are a good example of her informal style.

I give "Fabrication" four stars for "Making Things", but only three stars for "Making Meaning".

Rating:
Summary: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning
Review: Susan Neville, an English professor at Butler University, has received literary awards for her short fiction and essays. "Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning" is a collection of related essays, most new, but some previously published. I read the essays in order, but the reader is free to skip around.

I was surprised that Neville's factories were largely located in small towns in Indiana and not restricted to industrialized areas like Gary and Indianapolis. I was raised in Indiana, attended Purdue and Indiana University, was familiar with many of the small towns, and yet I had no inkling of these hidden manufacturing enterprises. I learned that the world class steel mill in the town of Crawfordsville is to the larger steels mills in Gary as a laptop is to an old mainframe. Little Edinburgh calls itself the veneer capital of the world. The man who perfected piston rings and invented cruise control lived his life in sleepy Hagerstown.

I read "Fabrication" while I was also reading Primo Levi's extraordinary work, "The Periodic Table", and I may have unfairly held Susan Neville to an exceptionally high standard. Neville looks for meaning in the context of factory tours in Indiana while Levi writes about himself, a chemist that was a Jew living in Mussolini's Italy. We learn from Levi much about chemistry and how a chemist tackles problems, but we even learn more about Levi himself, about life in a Fascist state, and about human relationships in difficult situations. Susan Neville's essays, while successful in their intriguing descriptions of how things are made, are less so in the examination of "making meaning".

I enjoyed Neville's descriptions of small factories, the manufacturing processes, and the workers themselves. She examined how these factories came to be and how they fit into a world of increasing globalization. Not all tours are equally interesting, but she does make a good tour guide.

I was less comfortable with her search for meaning. A few essays seemed a bit flat, but I found others insightful and intriguing. I particularly like "Veneer" with its surprising links to Primo Levi. "Smoke" was quite good with its look at the dying tobacco farming tradition along the Ohio. Neville's Silicon Valley analogy in "Carboys", the story of the automotive invention in the Midwest in the last century, made me wonder why I had never quite realized how exciting and creative those early decades must have been.

Will you like Susan Neville's style? I suggest that you take a look (see ... reviews) at her book, "Twilight in Arcadia", published by Indiana Historical Society Press. These excerpts are included in "Fabrication" as the essay titled "Smoke" and are a good example of her informal style.

I give "Fabrication" four stars for "Making Things", but only three stars for "Making Meaning".