November/December 2002
Wild dogs, murder, illicit money, a scrap-yard accident, eccentric characters, family-business issues—they’re all in Nancy Zafris’s novel The Metal Shredders, which offers a candid portrait of a fictional scrap company.
By Adam Minter
In my early 20s, I considered several professional career options, but for reasons I still can’t entirely explain I ended up working at my family’s scrap company.
For a while, I thought my story was unique, that I was the only son of a scrap dealer who, through sheer inertia, ended up worrying about baler breakdowns. But I was wrong—there is, in fact, a small fraternity of us in the business. At industry events, you can often find us huddled together, complaining about how our fathers won’t let us sell the decrepit cable crane in favor of a new hydraulic handler. We’re all victims of what Nancy Zafris calls “the scrap gene.”
Nancy Zafris is author of a new novel titled The Metal Shredders, which delves into the lives of John and Octavia Bonner, heirs to their family’s scrap business—John Bonner & Son Metal Shredders in Columbus, Ohio. Like many of us who grew up in such businesses, John and Octavia struggle with relatives, their own expectations for themselves, and the ever-changing fortunes and culture of the scrap industry.
The novel offers an intimate portrait of the dynamics and dysfunctions of a family scrap company, reading as if it were written by someone with years of scrap experience, knowledge, and connections. Zafris did not grow up in the scrap business, however. She gained her scrap experience through extensive research, which included interviewing a scrap veteran, reading industry publications, touring a processing operation, and more.
Zafris wrote the first draft of The Metal Shredders 12 years ago after publishing a short story by the same name (available in The People I Know, University of Georgia Press, 1990). Though the work is her first novel, Zafris is no newcomer to writing. For years, she has been recognized as one of America’s most acclaimed short story writers, and she serves as fiction editor of The Kenyon Review, one of the most prestigious forums for contemporary American short stories.
Given those credentials, Nancy Zafris isn’t someone you’d expect to find hanging around a shredder, much less writing about a family that owns one. But that’s just what she’s done: In the Bonner family, Zafris has not only created a compelling story, but she has also managed to convey the highly eccentric culture and people often involved in family scrap businesses.
One of the main characters is John Bonner, the third John Bonner to run the scrap company (except when his father—known as the Senior—interferes), who, at age 30, finds himself separated from his wife and doubting his commitment to the family business. His 34-year-old sister, Octavia, is an over-educated arts administrator who has just returned to Columbus with a broken heart and few career prospects. She takes a job in the company “for a while” until she figures things out. Together, the siblings seek ways to refashion—or recycle—their bad life choices into something more meaningful. In the process, they both find the ways and means to leave the scrap business altogether.
Beyond John and Octavia, the novel offers a cast of secondary characters who add to the story’s genuine feel. For example, there’s Ralph Dooley, the Link-Belt operator. “He’s an artist,” says John’s father, defending Dooley’s self-satisfied, even arrogant approach to running the challenging machine (after all, good cable-crane operators are hard to find these days). Then there’s Tony, a welder attending business administration classes at night in hopes of becoming part of the Bonner family’s inner circle. John likes Tony, and he has given him some chances, but in the end Tony “looks like a welder, he walks like a welder, and he eats like a welder.” There’s no way Tony’s going into management anyway because “it’s all family.”
The story also includes Hayley Badecker, a perky, blond railroad rep who looks like “a Hollywood realtor” and who has amorous designs on both John and Octavia; Don Capachi, the firm’s 82-year-old nonferrous metal sorter who moves “at the speed of an iceberg” yet who “can do whatever he wants until the day he dies or decides to quit”; and Worm, a laborer who meets an unfortunate end in an accident with the Link-Belt.
Then there’s the 55-year-old Senior, a brilliant and charming man with a world view that never extends far beyond Ohio, or scrap. “The fact is,” he explains to Octavia, “human beings come in different alloys—what can you do about it? By the time they’re adults their alloy has a specific gravity of this and maybe a tensile strength of that and it’s not going to change.”
The Senior, like his immigrant father who started the business, isn’t so far removed from the days and culture of scrap peddlers. John, in contrast, is part of a consolidating and more professionally managed industry that places a premium on “moving material” at the best possible margin. When the county attorney delivers a perfectly functional late-model LTD with 51,000 miles on it for shredding, the Senior insists that it be kept, cleaned, and resold—despite the fact that two dead bodies had been stashed in the trunk and the remaining stench makes the car unapproachable. When the employee assigned to clean the vehicle finds thousands of dollars hidden in the trunk, John decides to split the cash with two employees and shred the car. The resulting complications define the novel’s plot.
In the following interview, Nancy Zafris discusses the story behind the novel and explains why her scrap saga may continue in the future.
How did you learn about the unique culture of the family scrap business?
My initial encounters with the scrap business came through my father. He’s a retired school teacher, but he also worked nights, weekends, and summers as a certified welder at a scrap recycling yard. Many years later this business resurfaced in one of my short stories.
What factors intrigued you about the scrap industry in general and family scrap businesses in particular?
What strikes me as novelistic about a scrap yard is the natural conflict arising from family being thrown together. Just as important, there’s something aesthetically beautiful about scrap recycling in the way it fully lives out and repeats a life cycle. Regeneration out of degeneration is a powerful metaphor. Like a lot of industries that deal with infrastructure, there’s an architectural and even poetic envisioning of a grand scheme. I gave this appreciation to both John and his father. Octavia, ironically, comes at the scrap yard from a literary point of view. She understands literature and its theories, but even though she could spot the phoenix-rising metaphor in any poem, she completely misses it in the imposing design right in front of her.
In one sense, the story of John and his father could apply to almost any industry, yet there’s a sense in which it’s specific to a family scrap business.
John and his father both explain their worlds through scrap. Both share an appreciation of the philosophical undercurrents in what is simply trash to most people. The conflict between them is that their worlds are so different. The father is directed outward—he has an expansive view of how the world works and how he will always be on top of it. John is directed inward. For example, he compares zinc, a one-time worthless metal that’s now valuable, to his own memories—worthless to a stranger, priceless to him. Scrap, in a sense, has made everything relative to John.
The Metal Shredders started as a short story. At what point did you decide it was worth novelizing?
For the short story, I didn’t need many details. I do remember, however, that—as with most of my stories—I did some research, or tried to. In this instance I came up absolutely empty. Couldn’t find any information anywhere. So for the short story I just made it up. I relied on my visual recollection of the metal shredders where my dad worked.
At any rate, this tale became part of my first book, a collection of short stories. One day the production editor at my publisher mentioned that the best man at her wedding was a scrap recycler. Immediately, the wheels started turning. I began to think in terms of a novel.
I asked her if she’d introduce me to this scrap recycler. So I drove down to Athens, Georgia, and that’s how I met Freddy Loef [formerly of The Loef Co. Inc.].
What did you learn from him?
When I met Freddy, he said to me, “I read your story. You don’t know anything about scrap recycling.” And I said, “That’s why I’m here.”
Freddy was articulate, thoughtful, generous, incredibly knowledgeable, and refined. As he spoke, the fascinating details just began to fit. I needed an overview of how the business worked, and I needed small specifics to lend an air of reality to the story, both of which Freddy gave me.
What other research did you conduct, and how long did it take to write the book?
I spent two and a half days with Freddy. His facility was the only scrap yard I visited. After I got home, I began subscribing to Scrap magazine and received a lot of ReMA pamphlets that were very helpful. When I received a copy of the ReMA scrap specifications booklet, I knew I’d stumbled onto a gold mine. It read like a poem—Ebony, Malic, Twitch, and so on—and the metals they correspond to—red brass, old nickel silver, fragmentized aluminum. In several earlier versions of the novel, I just couldn’t resist those codes. I even wrote a whole chapter just so I could list those striking words. In the end, I had to hide the spec book from myself so I wouldn’t get too tempted.
I’d research as needed while I wrote because I wanted the book to be about character, after all. Even so, I’d done so much research that the first versions of the book were overwhelmed by all the scrap information. I began thinking up scenes just so I could use this information.
My editor first rejected the book years ago, and his main objection was that it was just too much about work. It took me three years for all of the versions. But there was a seven-year span when the book just sat on the shelf, and then I wrote the final version after that layoff in six months.
Was there a fact-checking process?
There wasn’t really any fact-checking concerning scrap recycling when the book was being edited because nobody knew anything about it. I knew I was fudging on several things, but it was necessary for the purposes of the novel. For example, I streamline the business quite a bit. Also, the fact that a scrap recycler wouldn’t waste his time cleaning up and reselling a car was something I tried to turn to my advantage.
Was it difficult to sell a novel with such a specialized focus?
My editor took the final version of the book right away, but before that point, yes, there was some reluctance on the subject matter. I’m getting that now. People who have enjoyed the book have told me how reluctant they were to read it, but then they found themselves loving the characters and all the arcana of the scrap yard. “I never knew scrap could be so fun”—that’s the reaction I’m getting.
It’s interesting that you chose to write specifically about a metal shredder as opposed to a more general scrap recycler. Why?
I used the term “metal shredders” because that’s the term my father used. Even after I got reeducated through Freddy, I stuck to “metal shredders” because I liked the term better. It was punchier. I thought it made for a more colorful title.
Though you refer in the novel to a “Jewish brotherhood” that dominates the scrap business, you wrote about what some Jewish scrap recyclers would call a “gentile yard.” Why is that?
I’m glad you asked that because nobody outside the business seems to know this. It’s obviously an aspect of the scrap business that I was aware of, but I chose to downplay it for a couple of reasons.
First, one of the themes that I wanted to isolate and explore is how class—and by that I mean social and economic—affects the way people deal with each other at work. Since most of my readers aren’t going to know how predominant the Jewish influence is in the industry, I thought that making the Bonners Jewish could lead people to think of the class conflict more in terms of their religion than their status within the business.
Second, though the Jewish history in scrap is fascinating, it’s also complicated, and I felt that to set the stage properly would slow down the narrative too much. Plus, not being Jewish myself, I’d have felt less comfortable presenting the family members because, on that important level, I wouldn’t know them as well and I’m afraid that I would have pulled my punches. That is, I might not have given them certain characteristics for fear that they would be interpreted as “Jewish” or Jewish stereotyping.
One of the themes in the book is that the family scrap business is disappearing. Is that something you observed?
The fact that the industry is consolidating and the smaller family business is disappearing mimics, for me, the fact that the immigrant generation that started this business has just about disappeared. It wasn’t that long ago that almost everybody in America had at least one grandparent who had experienced struggles as an immigrant arriving without money, without knowing how to speak English. When that generation left us, a rope to ourselves was severed.
Another issue in the novel is the difficulty that women have faced—and continue to face—in the scrap industry. Did you observe this firsthand? If so, what was your reaction as a woman researching and visiting a male-dominated scrap yard?
It wasn’t hard to figure out that this was probably not a place for women. Though Freddy Loef was such a gentle and civilized person, I wasn’t naive enough to believe that all the nonmanagement workers maintained such an elevated level of behavior. In fact, I believe that my dad might have come home with a few stories in this regard.
In the original version of the novel, there were no women in the yard except for Ada, the weighmaster cashier. It was in the final version that I added the sister, then the new female watchman, and then the female railroad rep. In that version I used the problems facing women as a way to develop character and provide conflict.
Have you received any responses from scrap recyclers about the book?
I’ve heard from a few scrap recyclers who have told me that they’ve thoroughly enjoyed the book. One substituted names of real people for my characters and had a good laugh that way. Another recycler came to one of my bookstore readings with his daughter because his wife told him about the book. They opened the novel and started giggling. When I looked at him, he said, “I’m a scrap man.” Once he identified himself, we just had a great time and a lot of laughs. People in the audience started asking him some questions. At the end, we took down a banner advertising my book and he had me inscribe it, “To the boys at Wooster Iron: Keep Shredding!”
What message, if any, do you want readers to take from The Metal Shredders?
There’s beauty in what seems ugly and meretriciousness in what seems beautiful.
You’ve been writing about scrap for more than a decade. Is The Metal Shredders your last word on the topic?
Well, the novel as it stands is missing two chapters that I took out at the end. One is from the weighmaster cashier Ada’s point of view. The other is from the aged metal sorter Don Capachi’s point of view. I’ve been reading Ada’s chapter at bookstore events, and invariably people ask if Ada is going to get her own novel. So you never know. She just might get recycled.
Excerpt
His dad said accidents happen, you have to move on, you must, but his dad wasn’t there, and his dad wasn’t there twenty-five years ago when the shredder swallowed a human soul and spat nothing out. If his dad had been on-site that day, if he’d been an eyewitness, if he’d tried and failed to stop the guy, as Don Capachi had tried, he would have done what John is doing now: he would have walked away. He would have sold the place out from under his father.
John moves over to the shredder and stands below the wet scrubber. Stands there. Just stands. Every day cars chewed into pieces emerge from the shredder’s maw and travel along the wet scrubber. The magnet intercepts the iron. The rest travels to the Stafford Slide. The Stafford Slide does nothing. With its funnel shape it has found the perfect form to stay at rest and still enact its purpose.
Its uncomplicated employment of physics has served to John as the wrong kind of beacon. He has thought that doing nothing was the answer, that somehow he could be a form at rest and find the answer.
The Metal Shredders by Nancy Zafris, published by BlueHen Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Adam Minter, a fourth-generation scrap recycler, has served in various positions in his family’s scrap company, Scrap Metal Processors Inc. (Minneapolis). He currently lives and works in Shanghai as a freelance writer.•
Wild dogs, murder, illicit money, a scrap-yard accident, eccentric characters, family-business issues—they’re all in Nancy Zafris’s novel The Metal Shredders, which offers a candid portrait of a fictional scrap company.