Reviewed by Matt Usher
Prairie Ashes
by Ben Nadler
American Buffalo Books
November 2025, Paperback, 214 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8218720117
“If you look for the working class in fiction,” wrote Orwell in an essay about Charles Dickens, “and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.” Orwell didn’t credit Dickens with truly writing about the true proletariat, rather only specific sections of those verging on bourgeois. And regardless of their position in society, all of Dickens’ protagonists speak in what you might find on the BBC, not the vernacular particular to their neighborhood or region.
Indeed, it is difficult to write about the working poor. Rare is the person who has both experienced and lived among them, then had the time and privilege of becoming a novelist. This is, of course, unfair to those who do fit that category; it is merely to note that it is not an easy path.
The author and at a time revolutionary soldier himself tried to do his own filling of the hole. In some ways, he did qualify. In Down and Out in Paris and London, he was a struggling dishwasher working in cramped basements for a handful of Francs in the former, and at times unhoused in the latter. He did not come from much, and did not end with much. Even when he was no longer in impoverished straits, Orwell endeavored to give the working poor, not to mention the poor out of work, a place in both novels with The Road to Wigan Pier, and in essays such as The Spike and In Front of Your Nose.
Down the Mine documents Orwell’s visit to a coal mine to understand the travails of truly hard work and to report that to the public who take their regularly supplied coal for granted. Men, rarely women – there was a superstition about women in mines – and children would travel miles down tunnels a little over half as tall as them. Once they reached the seam, they would breathe eventually-lethal coal dust as they, hunched, would swing their picks or blast with dynamite the vaunted coal. Every day, often without weekends, for slender pay.
Prairie Ashes by Ben Nadler also gives voice to these often unlauded workers, though its protagonist meets Orwell’s critique as, not a member of the working poor, but a punk named Barb who does hop a train and endure some hard living, but begins the book with secure living conditions and fe, at least no sign of, money troubles. However, the narrative is call and answer, with Barb’s life and research and the coal miners’ union’s socialist leaders. These, in turn, happen to be largely highbrows who read Tolstoy. Still, this is what I believe to be a successful exploration of a buried period of history where unions had real sway and the actual interests of the workers at heart. It is based upon an extensive bibliography and the use of university libraries, each of whose names can be found in the acknowledgements as well.
Unions have had a sad trajectory in US society. Yes, there may still be many unions, some of whom, say, the teachers’ union, are credited with true power. But unions once advocated for a change in the structure of society, to dismiss the cadging managers and owners and to give ownership to those who produced. Many were socialists and some were anarchists. As Noam Chomsky said, all anarchists are socialists, but not all socialists are anarchists.
As a dedicated punk, not merely a poseur, Barb is something of an anarchist herself. Authority must justify itself, and few do. She comes from country stock in the midwest, born at the time that the coal mines were closing and workers were given an empty-handed goodbye. But this is not entirely the reason she embarks upon a thorough mission to research the coal mine wars of Illinois. Rather, this comes from her traveling on a whim to meet her grandmother’s estranged brother in San Francisco. He was tied to the Nickell family on the front of that war. While these are fictional people, the scenario was very real and the author documents it well.
The book, as above, is told alternating between Barb’s current life in 1980’s Berkeley, California and fragments of scrapbooks and journals that she finds and an account of an interviewee tied to that same family. In a clever stroke, each chapter is titled with the location in which it was written (or recorded), and one is brought, not only through time, but also across the country. This is where the research really comes to bear. It is not easy to make a fictional historical document, but Nadler makes the past manifest. A possible blemish is, and this is difficult to be certain of without access to and experience with the same documents as the author, is that those of the past have largely elevated and modern diction. At its weakest, the narrative voice blends into Barb’s, but there are overtures in the form of figures of speech and somewhat infrequent touches of character. It can be hard to tell if this is Barb’s transliteration as she reads, or the diary or scrapbook verbatim. This may, of course, be wrong, as the subjects of the novel were well read and self-educated. But her interviewee, an engineer who declined to continue his family’s coal mining, refers to papers as agitprop, which seems a little out of place for a lumpen engineer.
One thing that permeates all of the narrative pathways is a tendency to build toward a pithy summation of a story or, often, of human nature. This is captured well, the flitting moments where a person captures a transcendent truth about the human condition. Here we see the touches of Nadler’s character work. The earliest I noted was Barb reflecting on a nearly-failed attempt to execute a rabbit on a communal farm: “I wonder how much of the violence and cruelty in the world comes about like that, just clumsily stumbling forward, without any evil intention. Maybe I’m just trying to make excuses for all the damage people do.” This is not only well put, but also establishes a secret only elucidated at the end of the novel. As a narrative should, it returns upon itself to harmonize with its early notes. Details flow naturally to these elements of pith. It’s notable that the novel does not constrain history or personality to make an elementary point or theme, but speaks of things as they happen, letting history and thought carry their own implicit themes and contradictions.
“I don’t think he wanted that – he wanted to forget history and to then be forgotten by it. But when he told me about his life, he forced some type of obligation on me, made me an accessory after the fact,” is another. This is about a figure that travels through the narrative, the estranged grand uncle, Larry. Barb spent a lot of time with him before his death, trading stories but more often listening than orating. Larry has his own connection with the mine wars, which is long in being revealed. He lived a life much like Barb’s, carried about by whim and the necessities of survival. It is that history that propels Barb upon her partially self-imposed deep research into the mine wars and the families involved on the union’s (not the scab union’s) side.
Barb often hints at less-than honest reasons for her research, something she feels guilty about hiding from her interviewee who gives us the past as recalled. It’s accurately portrayed that she must understand the dynamics of conversation, not to press on old wounds hidden or on implicating events that might make one who survived through the Pinkerton or McCarthy eras skittish. She has an impressive insight into this interplay as well as a charming honesty about that of which she is ignorant. The interviewer has splashes of her own commentary in footnotes, sometimes to register these subtleties, others to confirm or refute Maguire’s recollections. From his early life through the transitory time of manual labor and union wars, he reflects, “It was evident to me at a pretty young age – from the things I saw – that building a machine was better than being a replaceable part in one.”
“Do the words themselves change, become unfixed and rearrange themselves on the paper? Or is there only one future that’s ever possible? Must we struggle so to bring it forward?” This comes from Joan Nickell in the 40’s, a widow survivor of the war who lands after her uncertainties in New York City. It speaks to the author’s attention to their readings that women are included in the living past that Barb reads. Women were essential to the labor movements as the narrative reflects, often those who could mobilize and agitate while their husbands manned the strike, took part in workers’ wars, or worked for subsistence. Her past is the proverbial heavy crown upon Joan, something she must carry forward alone, at least until she finds a happy companion.
Incidental details help ground the novel in the non-fiction of which it is the counterpart. It includes a mention of the same superstition that Orwell learned: that women, just as on a ship, were believed to be bad luck. As well, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade arises, which is another thread of connection to Orwell. In Home to Catalonia, Orwell recounted his experiences of being a volunteer soldier on the Republican side of the civil war as a grunt for the POUM. The brigade was a group, parallel to Orwell, of people from across the societal spectrum who embraced equality and left to serve against Fascism. Not only were there writers and poets, but many came from the groundswell of workers’ rights groups, those whose interests were most at stake – the idea of a society culled of owners and leeches, of the workers and for the workers.
Orwell found that this ideal was realized for a brief time as it hadn’t in quite possibly the rest of the world; the mine workers’ find this in mutual aid and solidarity under the strike. To keep the line, they must both refuse to work and survive, often on donations of those in their community or sparse government fare. Other times they are cordoned by the National Guard or strike-breakers while demonstrating, and they rely upon one another to hold firm and to maintain morale. Such things are a dream in modern society, though Barb does register a sort of duty to carry forward these ambitions.
The novel ends in a revelation that inverts the entire narrative, well worth waiting for to see all of the voices’ obverse, to introduce a last perspective that both falls across and casts light from a new angle upon the foregoing. It gathers all of Barb’s thoughts and intentions to throw into relief her masked feelings and motives.
Prairie Ashes is well worth your time. Whatever your interests, it is the duty of the working class as much as it is the rentier class to understand what was once possible in the pursuit of a more equal society. Orwell found it once in Spain; even if for a brief time, it proves that things must not always be as they are, as well that authority is not invincible or necessary in its unjustified form.
About the reviewer: Matt Usher is an agender, highly neurodivergent writer and musician who likes poetry, tabletop roleplaying, trading card games (mtg and ygo), and professional wrestling. They are based out of Brooklyn with their two partners in a happy polecule. Most of their works are short stories but it happened that their first credit was in literary criticism. If you want to reach out and/or contact them regarding their reviews or stories (please do), you can find them at https://bsky.app/profile/mattusher.bsky.social