PROLES

In this novel, an idealist learns that labor politics hurt more in practice than in theory.

Bergman delivers a shaggy, political coming-of-age tale that begins as an intellectual epiphany and slowly hardens into a heat-blasted story of industrial labor. Simon Bussbaum (bus bomb—get it?) is a Queens-bred college dropout-in-waiting who has a revelation in 1973 while half-watching City of Emeralds, a blacklisted neorealist film about a ’50s copper miners’ strike in Mexico. The movie’s rough edges and unprofessional actors who play themselves hit Simon like Scripture (“The film was his burning bush”). His Trotsky-obsessed brother, Jake, dismisses the film as ideologically impure, but Simon takes it as a call to action. Spared by the Vietnam War draft lottery, Simon lights out for the Southwest, chasing political authenticity and the promise of reinvention in the desert. Tucson, Arizona, greets him with punishing heat, flickering televisions tuned to the Watergate hearings, and a dizzying parade of countercultural fantasies. A network of contacts lands him a job at Cobra Copper, a vast, hellish industrial complex whose smokestacks dominate the landscape. Simon’s initiation into industrial labor is brutal and disorienting. Assigned to the smelter, he spends nights pounding cooling slabs of copper amid vile stenches, molten metal, and the constant risk of death. The work becomes numbing, repetitive, and vaguely surreal, punctuated by grotesque camaraderie, amphetamines passed among workers, and the sense that one wrong move could result in annihilation. His political ideals are tested against the reality of an indifferent union, cruel managers, and sheer physical exhaustion. As Simon cycles through graveyard shifts, the novel lingers on his interior drift: Fantasies of escape, erotic distractions, and half-remembered pop culture merge with a growing suspicion that “la lucha” may be less a noble crusade than a mirage. He gets promoted, but it’s not a reward. Instead, it escalates him into even more dangerous work, forcing Simon to confront the gap between romanticized working-class heroism and the grinding facts of industrial capitalism.

Bergman’s achievement lies less in plot propulsion (though the archetypal descent into hell is gripping) than in atmosphere and voice. The story wears certain influences openly, drawing on Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, and Hunter S. Thompson for its bleak, scorched earth–style depiction of the death of post-’60s American idealism. The book remains unapologetically boomery: It’s stuffed with period details, political arguments conducted at bar-stool volume, and an affection for the era’s cultural detritus. The tale’s also proudly horny, with Simon’s gaze lingering on bodies, fantasies, and sensual reliefs as if sex were another stimulant necessary for survival. But it’s not corny. The proles live hard, dirty lives, depicted with surreal empathy. Bergman loves a tangent and rarely resists one. Yet that very looseness becomes part of the book’s appeal. Simon’s a vessel for the exhaustion of the political, physical, and generational flavors. His story succeeds by capturing the smell of hot copper, bad coffee, cheap speed, and expired utopias rather than by offering a pat redemption arc. It’s also relatively short, delivering its punches in concentrated doses. The novel delivers a humorous, weary, dark, and oddly tender portrait of a man who wants to join history and instead finds himself crushed beneath its machinery.

A funny, compelling odyssey to the world of industrial labor where ideals get blasted.