Book Review : Coal-Town Tale Mines History

Breaker Boys by Jan Kubicki (Atlantic Monthly: $17.95; 384 pp.)

“Breaker Boys” is a history lesson dressed up like a novel. Liking this book depends entirely on whether you’re interested in this chunk of history. Edification, not enjoyment, is the key here, but that’s not necessarily a non-compliment. “The year,” the jacket blurb remarks, “is 1900 in the coal town of Jeddoh, Pennsylvania.” The story, the blurb further cues us, “combines the social and memorably eccentric characters of Charles Dickens with the author’s vivid contemporary style.”

Let’s see if we can’t come up with a better--or at least more accurate--blurb than that.

“Breaker Boys” is in part, at least, Dreiserian. It takes as its subject the working classes at the turn of the century, and also takes, as an assumption, that how the working classes lived--what those families ate, how they argued and what they argued about and what their weddings and funerals were like--are all interesting in and of themselves, and worthy of attention. (I know this sounds obvious, but isn’t it an American literary custom to look “up,” in the social hierarchy like John Cheever or John O’Hara, rather than “down” like Jack London or Theodore Dreiser?)

A Perfect Fourth of July

In “Breaker Boys” there’s a rather astonishing resemblance to “ . . . And Ladies of the Club,” pausing as it does in its story of warring miners in that coal town of Jeddoh to render a perfect Fourth of July set piece: in the middle of all the action that jerks the characters this way and that, the nightmare of class struggle, the nightmare of the mine itself, suddenly Jan Kubicki stops the plot and pulls out a Glorious Fourth. This is what the struggling is about , he reminds us, this sweetness, this innocence may be what it is to be an American.

Yes, of course, this is where he introduces Mother Jones, an important character, certainly, in the narrative, but even her words pale against the images of fireworks in a night sky and rowboats on calm rivers, and bunting. . . .

Finally, “Breaker Boys” tips the scales as a kind of grisly, burly ancestor of John Updike’s early “Rabbit” novels. The bone-dreariness of everyday meaningless work, the crushing sense of being unappreciated and unseen; the knowledge that you’re useful only if you’re making money for somebody else, and when that usefulness is over you’ll be consigned--like Rabbit’s own unfortunate mom--to a dingy back bedroom to die. . . . All that machine-pulse, that sense of terrible futility, informs this novel.

Eager to Become Somebody

All right. The scene, as they say, is “1900 in the coal town of Jeddoh, Pennsylvania.” The main character is a Welsh boy, Euan Morgan, 11 years old, sick to death of staying in grade school (which is taught by a sexually repressed fiend, Gladys Protheroe). What Euan pines for is to grow up, to become somebody in his world, to earn money to help his mother, to go into the mines like his dad, and especially like his elder brother, Rhys, a charming lad who’s handsome and loves to tell jokes and is a natural musician.

(Don’t you hate it in books like this that it’s never the fat stupid miners who get killed, or the ones who burp, or snore, or slap their wives and kids? It’s always the handsome ones who know the best jokes and have just mastered the violin! To read Rhys’ initial description is to know he’ll be a dead man in another 200 pages.)

Soon Euan goes to work. (Kubicki has done the requisite prodigious amount of research and each detail of the mine is meticulously portrayed.) The lowest job in this unlovely place is to be a breaker boy; to sort coal in a big nasty room as it comes hurdling through a monstrous funnel and into a long, long trough. The boys torment each other mercilessly.

But more terrifying than any of that is when the coal gets clogged up there in the giant funnel, and the breaker boy with the least seniority gets to go up and jump around in the coal until he breaks the clog. If he doesn’t get pulled out promptly after the clog breaks, he gets shredded to death.

On a more abstract level, beyond the exposition of specific awful working conditions, the novel explores the conflict between Polish and Welsh miners; how nationalistic paranoia was exploited by mine management: “I could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half!” gloats the owner of this mine. He is quoting Jay Gould, but he himself eagerly espouses this philosophy.

For the first two-thirds of the novel, the mine owner’s plan seems to be going very nicely. This villainous creep uses informers, night evictions and just plain terror to keep the miners at each others’ throats instead of at his, but he hasn’t counted on the likes of the diminutive, absolutely fearless union organizer, Mother Jones.

The question of fear is what Mother Jones addressed then and what, as a novelist, Kubicki addresses now. What made American miners work under such horrendous conditions? How could they have been so callous as to send their own children into the mines? That fear, which at some level was far worse than the fear of death--since they tacitly chose death in the mines rather than stand up for a better life--is the real subject of this novel. Euan Morgan loses his fear and organizes a boys’ strike, and the ending here is novelistically thrilling, even if contrived.

I do have to say, though, that the figure of the old maid schoolteacher and her subsequent metamorphosis into a sex-crazed slut, even as she remains a member in good standing of respectable society , is totally unconvincing and absolutely ludicrous in this context. Kubicki should have done a tad more research on ladies in mine towns, or better yet, have left her out completely. The book really belongs to those gallant breaker boys.