The Good Hand

December 1, 2020
The "boomtown" here is Williston, ND, where industrial-scale fracking has drawn thousands of unemployed men to work the massive Bakken Formation, and the "good hand" is the accomplished oil worker that Smith, a musician and playwright, ever so slowly becomes in the months from spring 2013 to winter 2014. The American Dream might beckon, but Smith is blunt in his response: "What [those three words] really mean is: Money. And I don't know a damn thing about money. I just know I haven't had enough of it." Smith arrives in Williston with all of $3,000 in cash, and leaves with less than $2,000. But the copious notes he took there bore this book, celebrating the lives of both Williston's townspeople and the men who worked the derricks, laying out the relentlessly perilous nature of the trade they plied, centering its importance in serving the world's energy demands, and tracking Smith's transformation from city slicker to "trained-up" professional. Those notes also deliver a deceptively affecting snapshot of blue-collar America in a singular place and time.

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December 14, 2020
Smith impresses in this fascinating debut memoir about his 2013 move from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Williston, N.Dak., to become an oil field hand. Modeling his life on Teddy Roosevelt, who transformed himself from a “squeaky-voiced four-eyed dork” to an “Indiana Jones president,” Smith set out to mature from a self-indulgent kid into a man “tough as a hickory knot” by “be beaten and pummeled, knocked down” by hard labor. He began as a truck driver’s assistant and describes, in the profanity-laced language of his new colleagues, how he developed a kinship with them. Many were abused by their fathers and Smith, likewise, recounts his own memories of abuse (“Dad had threatened to kill us, yes, but it wasn’t the first time”). He also describes how he forced himself to compartmentalize his coworkers’ “casual, constant, continuing faucet drip of racism.” Over the course of a year he earned their respect while discovering that “a good hand... is a person who does honest work to the best of their ability every day and who offers that work as a living prayer.” Smith’s prose shines when sharing how his experience on the oil rig shaped his idea of what it means to live a meaningful life. This page-turner delivers.

January 1, 2021

Smith peppers his narrative about moving to the oil town of Williston, ND, with vivid descriptions of the poor, dangerous, occasionally violent, overwhelmingly white male inhabitants of the oil fields, and the flophouses that sprang up to support them. Comparisons with J.D. Vance will be unavoidable, and as with Hillbilly Elegy, the book attempts to describe and present a lifestyle that is starkly different from that of the stereotypical middle-class coastal resident. Part social commentary, part memoir, this is a sprawling, uneven book. At times it reads like the coming-of-age story of a man grappling with memories of a tragic, supremely dysfunctional youth. At other times it reads as a history primer, with brief biological sketches of historical figures who have also spent time in North Dakota. In still other moments, there is a nearly journalistic recounting of conversations and events that occur during his time in Williston, creating a vivid image of a cast of characters that seems primed for depiction in film or television. VERDICT This lengthy volume will appeal to those interested in masculinity studies and memoirs dealing with family dysfunction, as well anyone curious about life in an oil boomtown during the early 2010s.--Rebecca Brody, Westfield State Univ., MA

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January 1, 2021
A folk singer and playwright goes to the oil fields and returns with a remarkable book. This is the book that Hillbilly Elegy should have been: a white-hot, fiercely argued case for rural working people in the face of their economically brutal lives. In 2013, unmoored in New York City, Smith traveled to the epicenter of the Bakken shale oil boom, arriving with about $5,000 to his name, hoping for much more. Williston, North Dakota, he writes, "was a tool, and we were using it to extract money from the oil companies the same way those companies were using us to extract oil from the earth." The "we" in question are lean, hungry men from a variety of backgrounds, many spoiling for a barroom brawl. Whatever their ethnicity, they work in dangerous conditions, boiling under the summer sun and freezing in the Arctic-vortex winter. Life in Williston is no less fraught. As Smith writes, the overall crime rate during his time there was four times the national average, the incidence of rape and assault even higher. The author is no stranger to the bloody grind, having come from a dysfunctional home. In a particularly memorable moment in a book packed with them, he observes that most soldiers come from the rural poor and have suffered poverty and abuse all their lives: "These veterans have PTSD before they experienced combat. They leave home broken and come home more broken." They come to the oil fields that way, too. Smith, having veered into overdrinking to the point of driving the wrong way down a highway, notes that they, like him, leave the oil fields with about as much money as they arrived with. Smith's narrative, like Ben Ehrenreich's Desert Notes, brims with intelligence and foreboding. "The North Dakota boom isn't the one that we need to worry about," he writes. "Boomtown Earth is busting." A penetrating, blazing look at people whom many of us have forgotten--but who are the nation's truly essential workers.

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