‘Thrillingly and wrenchingly funny … like Educated and Hillbilly Elegy, The Good Hand is one of those brilliant close-ups that suddenly flips to become a wide shot of the American moment. An engrossing combination of participation, reportage, self-discovery, and witness' David Lipsky The must-read memoir of 2021.Like thousands of restless men left unmoored by the crashing economy, Michael Patrick Smith arrived in the fracking boomtown of Williston, North Dakota homeless, unemployed, and desperate for a job. Renting a mattress on a dirty flophouse floor, he slept boot to beard with migrant men who came from across America and as far away as Jamaica, Africa and the Philippines. They ate together, drank together, argued like crows and searched for jobs they couldn't get back home. Smith's goal was to find the hardest work he could do – to find out if he could do it. He hired on in the oil patch where he toiled fourteen hour shifts from summer's 100 degree dog days to deep into winter's bracing whiteouts, all the while wrestling with the demons of a turbulent past, his broken relationships with women, and the haunted memories of a family riven by violence.The Good Hand is a memoir of danger, exhaustion, suffering, loneliness and grit; a modern-day reincarnation of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that exposes the struggles of America's marginalised workers – the rough-hewn, cast-off, seemingly disposable men who do an indispensable job. Smith observes this world with a critical eye; yet he comes to love his co-workers, forming close bonds with Huck, a giant of a young man whose quick fists get him into trouble with the law, and The Wildebeest, a foul-mouthed truck driver who torments him but also trains him up and helps him survive.The Good Hand is ultimately a book about transformation, a memoir unfolding one man's attempt to burn himself clean through hard work, to reconcile himself to himself, to find community, and to become whole.
