The Good Hand

That morning, I'd made the mistake of thinking about giving up. The thought had wormed its way into my brain, and now I couldn't seem to shake it. I was bone-tired, afraid, and nauseous.



There were many ways to get hurt on location. Or die. Exhausted men operated heavy machinery, trucks thundered past, heavy objects flew through the air-steel swinging steel around on cables, hooks, and slings. You could go blind. You could lose your hearing. You could lose a limb. A rod could snap, and bam: instant lobotomy. One hundred thirty-eight oil field hands had been killed in the United States the previous year. I looked around. I could see it happening to me. My breathing sped up, and my stomach knotted. I tried to take slow steady breaths.



Dragonflies buzzed around. I walked through a row of pickup trucks, across the dirt patch and toward a pile of wind walls-thin metal sheets some fifteen feet across. A wind wall does exactly what it sounds like it should do. On the high plains, with no trees or mountains to stop it, the wind is fierce. Even in the summer, gusts of northern air can all but knock you down. The walls protect against that. They make it easier for men to work the floor of the drilling rig, two to three stories above the dirt.



I was twenty yards from the crane and maybe thirty yards from the base of the rig. I squinted up into the sun. A wind wall, attached to the crane by four metal chains on the crane's whip line, dangled in the air above the rig's floor. A crew of roughnecks, strapped into harnesses and wearing heavy work boots, guided the wall down, set it carefully in place, and, after lumbering along the edge of the floor, swung their sledgehammers at large metal pins to attach it to the rig.



When the wall was connected, the crane operator reeled in the whip line. It swung in an arc above the men, away from them and toward me. With the precision of a bullet hitting a bull's-eye, the chains came to a sharp stop directly in front of me, the hooks suspended at the level of my chest.

Lyrical and engrossing . . . an extraordinary tale . . . Smith writes movingly of his chaotic childhood . . . There have been predictable comparisons to [ ] J.D. Vance s Hillbilly Elegy and Tara Westover s Educated but Smith s story, blessedly, comes with more (crude) humor . . . undeniably powerful. The Sunday Times (UK)

The Good Hand addresses wider debates over oil but never lets them derail the story. Smith has a playwright s ear for dialogue, a reporter s knack for the telling detail, a novelist s way with a good metaphor and the storytelling skill of a folk singer and he puts them all to good use. Upstream

A white-hot, fiercely argued case for working rural people in the face of their economically brutal lives . . . brims with intelligence and foreboding . . . a penetrating, blazing look at people whom many of us have forgotten but who are the nation s truly essential workers. Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Smith impresses in this fascinating debut memoir . . . [his] 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. Publishers Weekly

Thrillingly and wrenchingly funny, Candide in the oil fields of North Dakota. What Michael Patrick Smith found there, along with hustlers, brawlers, and fast-buck and fast-spend artists, was a gusher of a story about the national character. 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. Smith has put together a thrilling combination of participation, reportage, self-discovery, and witness. David Lipsky, New York Times bestselling author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
 
This land, despite what Woody Guthrie sang, is not our land, and the violence involved with extracting its resources infects all our lives, starting with the lives of the men who show up to take it. In The Good Hand, Michael Patrick Smith guides us through a long muddy year in North Dakota s oil boom, telling the story as if it were a Sam Shepard play that can t be stopped even though people are about to get badly hurt. It s a surprisingly tender account of a man who is searching for salvation from the sins of his family, from the drunken and drugged-up sins of a world broken by corporations while trying desperately to find himself through work. He discovers that, like digging for oil, formed for years under great pressure, digging out the past is grueling, but worth the wait. Robert Sullivan, author of The Thoreau You Don t Know
 
A sincere and colorful account of down-and-out men trying to make it and maybe grow up in the eternal dreary tailgate party and crushing dangerous toil of the fracking boom. As one of Smith s mentors tells him, now you know why gas is so expensive. William T. Vollmann, author of The Lucky Star

A fine successor to Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, translated to the epic scope and sweep of the prairie West. While telling his bruisingly candid tales of toiling in a North Dakota oil field ('if this breaks me, then I ll know what breaks me'), Smith paints a larger portrait of the American worker's heroically tragic struggle for a thin slice of the pie. John Strausbaugh, author of Victory City and City of Sedition

A thrill-read There Will Be Blood made modern, and with added wit The Good Hand is that rare literary treasure: all things, all at once. By mixing memoir with reportage and analysis, and  telling his tale with rigor and joy,  Michael Patrick F. Smith gives us a hoot that also feels necessary. The book comprises its own impossible boom story: Smith has drilled barrel after barrel of crude fun from the dust and stone of American capitalism. Darin Strauss, NBCC-Award winning author of Half a Life and The Queen of Tuesday

Novelistic, gritty reportage, very large in heart, with memorable characters on almost every page, The Good Hand will remind readers of the best of Orwell and Ehrenreich. A beautifully evoked, compelling memoir of hard work in a hard place. Philip Dray, author of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America

Like the men who populate it, The Good Hand is big and rowdy, busting its ass to uncover something ancient, buried, crude and essential. By placing his body as a hard-worn cog in its machine, Smith gets to the heart of our addiction to oil and uncovers the demands it makes on the rough, desperate men who flock to boomtowns, looking to find and lose themselves all at once. Baynard Woods, co-author of I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad

A sprawling epic about life in the boom times North Dakota, oil and cash coming down like rain. Think Samuel Clemens in San Francisco during the Rush or Jack London in the Klondike. The Good Hand is a wonderful feat of storytelling that illuminates a city, a moment, and the American character at large. Rich Cohen, author of The Last Pirate Ship of New York

[An] affecting snapshot of blue-collar America in a singular place and time. Booklist