I just finished reading Paul Clemens’ Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant (2011) for fun. There was some irony in my purchase. Punching Out is a narrative of the closing of a stamping shop in Detroit, describing the shipping of the cast-and-die stamping lines from the closed plant to suppliers in Mexico and in other developing countries. The irony was that I bought the book because it was for sale at a closing Borders bookstore where everything was discounted and for sale, including the bookshelves.
I can’t say that I recommend the book. In one of the later chapters, Clemens explains that his idea of a good book is a stringing together of interesting quotes or moments. And Punching Out reads that way. Clemens does give a sense of the work involved in dismantling and guarding a closed facility, and though he would not like it perhaps, the book also captures the long, slow decline of Detroit. But it reads primarily as a privileged person’s encounter with the working class. The first third of the book is his account of how he eventually got access to the plant. After that there are descriptions of his interactions with the workers who cycle in and out of the plant. Positively, Clemens does highlight the skills required, the work ethic, and the limited options available to workers today in the wake of the shuttering of manufacturing as a path to middle-class status. Negatively, the main person the reader gets to know is the author. Although not framed as a memoir, it comes somewhat close, with the author’s angst about his own class trajectory and feelings about what the plant closing means taking center-stage above the profiles of those he encounters.
Finally, although Clemens at times disparages the “ruin porn” — photos of Detroit’s decline and abandoned buildings — the book’s strength lies in the rich descriptions (“ruin text-based porn”?) of the scale of the plant or the stamping equipment; descriptions that share many of the features of photojournalistic work.
For fun, below is an example of my “ruin porn” photography, a burned out building in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Copyright Ezra Rosser
Poverty Law 