[Continued from Midwestern Writing, Part I. sch 11/7/22]
For all I can say that is good about the Midwest, I cannot forget that we also can be narrow-minded, parochial, and nasty. Daily Kos publicized this bit of Indiana stupidity: Scene From An Indiana Restaurant. Yet, that restaurant owner may be as kind-hearted and charitable as anyone on Daily Kos - so long as anyone named Pelosi is not in the conversation. Whatever vision we have of the Midwest, whatever motivates us to write about this part of the country, we cannot either ignore nor denigrate this kind of behavior. I assume no one agrees with such indecency. Understanding hate and anger is one thing, promoting it is another thing altogether. To sound like my mother, we were brought up to behave better.
Criticism is not hate. Hate has to as much to do with good writing as does cheap sentimentality.\
Before starting on this long epistle to writing about the Midwest and Midwest writers, you might want to check out the discussion Is There Such a Thing As Midwestern Literature? .
I feel the modern Midwest and its writers - I will include myself as one of them - as marginalized by Brooklyn and other places. This may have left a bit of a chip on my shoulder. What I read in prison gave me some insights on how not to become buried by my chip. Europe has marginalized areas, too. Scotland is one of those areas, and reading Alasidair Gray's Lanark opened my eyes to possibilities. Eastern European writers like Milan Kundera kept them open. Reading Futures of Postimperial Glasgow reminded me of what we from the Midwest can learn from Scotland:
It is this aspect of Stuart’s fiction, the way he writes about characters experiencing a dialectical shift they don’t fully grasp, that most aligns his work with his literary forefather—not Dickens, as critics assume, but Thomas Hardy. For Marxist theorist Raymond Williams, Hardy was a chronicler not of timeless rural life but rather of “change,” particularly the “difficulty of choice” in an evolving world where the range and consequences of one’s choices are difficult to assess.2 Often, characters’ choices result in tragedy. Most famously, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the decision of Tess’s parents to dispatch their daughter to a manufacturing family, in the hopes that she will make an eligible match, results instead in a sexual violation that culminates in Tess murdering her rapist and her subsequent hanging.
Such brutal fatalism has come to define Hardy’s work for many readers, but Williams complicates this reputation through his focus on what he calls a “structure of feeling,” the prevailing but inarticulate experiences that characterize a historical moment.3 Williams sums up the mood of Hardy’s fiction with the phrase “slighted and enduring.” Hardy’s communities are “slighted in a struggle to grow—to love, to work with meaning, to learn and to teach,” but “enduring” because this impulse to grow, love, and work “pushes through and beyond particular separations and defeats.”4
One could easily apply Williams’s words to Young Mungo. As adolescents, the protagonists’ primary preoccupation is their struggle to find love, work, and learning in postindustrial Glasgow. They certainly experience defeats. In a particularly Hardyan subplot, Jodie’s educational prospects are jeopardized when her teacher impregnates her. The novel becomes even more brutally Hardyan when, during a fishing trip arranged by his mother, Mungo kills two men who raped him.
I also found Thomas Hardy educational.
Another thing - for readers and writers - is how little is made of Midwestern writers working now. Of the Americans winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Steinbeck, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Joseph Brodsky were not out of the Midwest. 100 Must-Read Books of the American Midwest from Book Riot tries to remedy this problem. I have read only 23 of the 100; out of the remaining 77, I know of another 23 by name of author or title. The Daily Beast also concerned itself with current Midwest writers in Best Novels on the Midwest: From Franzen to
If you didn’t know that Vonnegut had so much as sneezed in Indiana, let alone was raised there, it’s not surprising. Just as cultural discourse has a tendency to eviscerate the Midwesternness of literary legends of the past, so it does with today’s leading authors. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is still a top seller and Franzen himself is a perennial contender for “Best American Novelist.” Freedom is set in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Franzen is a native of a St. Louis suburb. But as talked-about, reviewed, and described as Franzen is, his connection to the canon of Midwestern literature remains subdued. The fact is, while writers from other areas of the U.S. are typically discussed in context of their native landscape, writers from the Midwest, strangely, are not—even when their fiction spotlights the region.
There are Southern Gothic tales, Westerns, New York stories, and plenty of novels about Boston, California, and even Washington, D.C. But what of the fiction native to the center of America? Alas, even passionate readers might draw a blank about literature that’s emerged from this overlooked, but nonetheless mythic, landscape.
This article has a list of 13 books, a little overlap with the Book Riot list. I have read 9 of the 13. What I notice about both lists are the majority are pretty long in the tooth. The discussion I found The Millions' Bridge Across the Country: On the Literature of the Midwest discussing more recent authors, the younger ones without any bestsellers:
There is no disservice being done here, I think. While Drury is caught up in the day to day and Rhodes works unique bildungsromans, the new Midwestern writers pick up on the other side of the tracks. Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, explores the fallen industrial city of Joliet, Illinois, and its stories are as familiar to me as Drury’s. The accounting for this co-existence is a simple one: the Midwest accommodates an enormous amount of difference already. Instead of being a region known for a certain type of character (you cannot, I expect, call an Ohioan to mind as easily as a Californian, a Texan, a New Yorker), in truth the region is not only its own, but also the bridge between these disparate cultures and literatures. The Midwest holds part of both the Rust and Bible Belts, contains flatlands, hills, mountains in the Ozarks, and the beginnings of the Appalachians. I have seen cacti growing on a cliff in Nebraska, where just across a lake are the Sandhills, America’s best grazing land. In the Big Ten Conference alone people are known to bleed entirely different colors.
More particularly and broadly, there are Midwestern female writers to consider. Women: An Essential Reading List - Meghan O'Gieblyn Recommends 8 Novels From Ohio to Iowa and Beyond, appeared on LitHub:
Women who have written about the Midwest are rarely spoken of categorically. Some (like Margurite Young) have been inexplicably overlooked, while others (like Toni Morrison) have reached such transcendent stature, their writing is not considered strictly Midwestern. Like their male counterparts, many are writing as exiles from the region, but their visions are often complicated, characterized by uncertainty more than repudiation or easy romanticism. In Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, the narrator, Ginny, looks out at the Iowa cornfields and thinks about the vast marshland that once covered the landscape before it was drained by European immigrants. “The view along the Scenic,” she notes, “taught me a lesson about what is below the level of the visible.” A capacity to look beneath the surface is what distinguishes the best regional writers. This is particularly true in the Midwest, a region that does not reveal itself to those who see the world in broad strokes. Class signifiers are more subtle here, and prejudice and racism are often veiled beneath the insidious pleasantries of Midwestern nice. The women I’ve chosen for this list are united by a willingness to revisit the history of the region, or revise it, calling attention to what has been forgotten and what has gone unsaid.
This list has 8 entries, and I have read only 2. I do believe this list may have more recent writers as a percentage. The two I read are also on the other lists. The Belt Magazine's The Past and Present of the Fiction of the Midwest (Wherever That Is) discusses new writers as well as their themes:
But if today’s Midwestern writers aren’t on top of the news the way their precursors were, they aren’t engaging in empty nostalgia either. Something more dialectical is going on: just as the books set in the present day are reckoning with the past, the books set in the past are also arguing with the present. Midwestern fiction today is a living manifestation of the tension between the region’s old idealism and present-day reality. Robinson, Eugenides, Ng, and Just—and Jayne Anne Phillips and many more we’ll get to—have used their novels to voice themes about race, sexuality, work, faith and more that they wouldn’t have had the freedom to in the time when their books are set. That’s a risky strategy that doesn’t always make for persuasive fiction: implanting contemporary values upon the stories of the past is a tricky business if realism is your game. But I think Midwestern fiction is stronger for the number of writers who’ve risen to the task. The better writers on that front, such as Flynn, Ware, and Dinaw Mengestu, exploit the surfaces of the homey Midwest tale to smuggle in a more provocative or contemporary perspective. Contemporary American fiction is often dismissed as dealing in safe and gentle domestic family dramas set in white and upper-middle-class milieus. That’s not what’s happening in these books, though.
The Chicago Tribune asked What is the Midwestern literary tradition? and its answer may explain why we do not know more about current Midwestern writers:
The Midwest hides in plain sight, both in terms of geography and literary influence. Perhaps part of this has to do with the varied landscape of the Midwest. The geographic boundaries stretch from northern Michigan's pine forests to the Appalachians in southern Ohio, from the eastern plains of the Dakotas to the steel country of western Pennsylvania. If Midwestern literature has any central preoccupations, they would probably be belonging and immigration, which are often intertwined. During the first half of the 20th century, the Midwest's manufacturing strength helped foster both the African-American migration out of the South, as chronicled with agonizing clarity in William Attaway's 1941 novel "Blood on the Forge," as well as the settlement of enormous populations of Eastern Europeans fleeing after World War II.
But with the collapse of industry and the rise of the Rust Belt, as well as the demise of the middle class, many Midwesterners ended up torn between remaining loyal to a place — one where the American Dream had largely become a myth — and trying to find better lives elsewhere. That tension isn't unique to the Midwest or the literature from this place; that's the story America is grappling with as a whole right now. We just went through it faster than some. So perhaps the problem with Midwestern literature not emerging as a cohesive tradition has less to do with the fact that it is hard to define, and more that it represents American literature in general. Again, hiding in plain sight.
Off the Shelf published 12 Gripping, Heartfelt, and Powerful Novels That Take Place in the American Midwest, of which I have read none. And there are all sources I have for modern Midwestern writers and their novels.
If you want something more scholarly, there is The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the midwestern literature website from the University of Michigan. The Cleveland Review of Book is working on exploring Midwestern literature, if not quite in the academic way of the other two sites. Those links will not lead you so much to particular books as much as what is being written about. Still, that can be useful. I find ideas get sparked from this kind of reading.
Speaking of topics, the article from The Belt is why I latched onto the aforementioned Futures of Postimperial Glasgow. Both critique their local writers for being caught up in the past. Consider the following quotes, the first comes from The Belt, and the second from Futures of Postimperial Glasgow. Different places, similar problems.
A few years ago I noticed something about my favorite works of contemporary fiction set in the Midwest: they were all set in the past. Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002) is a sweeping tale that mostly takes place in 1960s Detroit. Marilynne Robinson’s Iowa-set novels)—Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014)—explore the state in the middle of the twentieth century. Ward Just’s An Unfinished Season (2004) spotlights upper- class journalists and lower-class laborers in 1950s Chicago. Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014) is set in 1970s Ohio. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Thee Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) is thick with flashbacks to Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition—an event that, thanks to Erik Larson’s 2003 blockbuster historical true-crime tale, The Devil in the White City, seems to be the only Midwestern story people find interesting en masse besides cop and hospital dramas. And on and on.
This struck me as a problem. Why were writers considering the Midwest as a place where things happened, but no longer did? Earlier generations of writers didn’t behave this way. The canonical Midwest writers—Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright—all wrote about Illinois, Michigan, Nebraska, and Ohio in their moment, using their fiction for journalistic, way-we-live-now purposes at a transformative moment for the region. Through the first half of the twentieth century and much of the postwar period, the American economy shifted from agricultural to urban, and the migration of blacks from the South and immigrants from Europe made the Midwest an industrial powerhouse, and a rich breeding ground for social conflict to boot. Sinclair Lewis satirized that moment; Wright condemned the racism that accompanied it; Bellow celebrated transcending it.
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Whether ranting about a former prime minister or fascinated by Victorian architecture, Stuart’s characters can feel stuck in the past. By extension, they might feel alienated from their future and our present. The Scotsman, for instance, notes the curious fact that while chart-topping Irish novelists like Sally Rooney “are writing about present day Ireland,” contemporary Scottish writers often revisit “the hard and gritty 1970s–1990s.” But maybe the gritty 1990s and present-day Scotland aren’t so discontinuous. Mungo reflects so many of Stuart’s characters when he indulges in the fleeting fantasy of working in the city center. Such a fantasy is the result of communing with the past.
But can knowing the past open up possibilities for the future? History naturally provides fantasy its fuel, given that to fantasize means to expand one’s imagination of what’s possible, and the past is, by definition, what is possible. But the past’s link to the future is forged not only by fantasy. By placing his characters’ postindustrial malaise within the context of the city’s ongoing histories of artistic achievement and economic dynamism, Stuart holds out the possibility for endurance—and even hope.
I did this - went to the past for my stories. I started - for reasons still not understood by me except for a long term interest - with the Versailles, Indiana lynching of 1897 and moved forward from there. Will my being in prison with no contact with current life in Indiana serve as an adequate excuse? I am working on being more current.
In another Electric Lit entry, Do Sophisticated Midwesterners Exist?, an interview of Curtis Sittenfeld, I found agreement and another theme for Midwestern writers:
RS: Yeah that definitely makes sense, it was really refreshing to read someone like that. In that story as well, there’s these notes of her casual elitism but she kind of also acknowledges that her and her ex had this kind of insufferable lifestyle. How does that relates to your fiction as a whole of characters working to overcome their immediate notions of privilege?
CS: I’m not always sure that they’re working to overcome it. I do think that I write about characters who tend to be educated and relatively privileged. We live in such complex interesting times, one thing I’m sort of curious about is if I can do justice to a character and justice to a story, I can write about any topic if I can pull it off. If I wrote about someone who came from a very impoverished socioeconomic background, in some ways I think I would be opening myself up to more criticism or a different kind of criticism from the kind I open myself up to by consistently writing about privileged white women.
I think that the Midwest feels a bit underrepresented to me in fiction, and I think sometimes if there’s a Midwestern character, they’re supposed to be someone who is naive. I like staking out as my territory the sophisticated although also flawed Midwesterners. I really think that a lot of the people who live on the coasts don’t think that emotionally sophisticated Midwesterners exist.
In Qualified optimism and the complexity of Midwestern literature from The Michigan Daily, I found what I will finish this discussion of whether there is a Midwestern literature, and what are the subjects open to such a literature:
In unintentional coordination, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s essay collection “Interior States” picks up the kernel of awareness wrought by Smith’s experiment with local detail and magnifies it into a cogent regional mentality, enabling larger discussion on how Midwesterners exist in America. In her opening piece “Dispatch from Flyover Country,” O’Gieblyn acknowledges the inherent harshness in the interpersonal attitude of her region, recalling how her attempts to make small talk as a Chicago cocktail waitress were “invariably met with a cascade of fatalism.”
“For a long time, I mistook this as cynicism,” she admits, but eventually realizes “it is something more like stoicism, a resistance to excitement that is native to this region.”
Throughout “Interior States,” O’Gieblyn ruminates on the location and effects of Midwestern stoicism in an impressive variety of settings, including the Moody Bible Institute, Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, an intelligent design theme park, the “Pure Michigan” ad campaign and Hell. The collection, honestly, is accordingly random, lacking commitment to a core focus and instead bouncing around multiple big ideas that really deserve their own dedicated collections. Nevertheless, these essays all manage to touch on the role of this Midwestern stoicism in some form, demonstrating its versatility and pervasiveness. In a particularly salient scene, O’Gieblyn describes a reunion dinner at which old friends who brain-drained their way to Brooklyn or the Bay “educate (her and her husband) on the inner workings of the tech industry … refer(ring) to the companies they work for in first person plural … laps(ing) into the utopian … conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a spiritual mission.” O’Gieblyn and her husband resign to being techsplained in the interest of keeping peace around the dinner table, but internally balk at the cultural clash. “Here, work is work and money is money,” O’Gieblyn explains, “and nobody speaks of these things as though they were spiritual movements or expressions of one’s identity.”
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Through their writing, Smith and O’Gieblyn seem to encounter the subtle, powerful pragmatism of the Midwest in their own voices, tracing it back to the everyday violence that defined the landscapes of their upbringing, both physical and psychosocial. Their work isn’t thrilling or easy, but it does illuminate a complex and resilient cultural identity in the land so often dismissed as “flyover country,” unworthy of study or stay. In fact, it is this very sort of reductive dismissal to which Midwest pragmatism is immune. In this vein of thought, the “isolation” so often ascribed to the region appears more like liberation — freedom from the social drug of “unqualified optimism,” and the emergence of a sort of spiritual elasticity in its wake.
It seems important to note that Smith and O’Gieblyn aren’t attempting to argue for the superiority of their perspective (such a case, it seems, would be oppositional to it). The project of “Flyover Country” and “Interior States” is to illuminate another worldview, one not particularly better or worse than that of predominating American culture, but one that does exist with its own pros and cons.
“Midwestern Gothic” closed its presses in 2021, but Russell and Pfaller’s publishing endeavors weren’t the only ones in recent years looking to fortify a Midwestern-centric literary scene. In fact, their efforts foreshadowed a number of Midwest-centric or Midwest-based presses, publications and journals that would pop up in the 2010s until today.
Organizations like Belt Publishing, an independent press founded in 2013 in Cleveland, Cleveland Review of Books, a literary review that began publication in 2018, and Of Rust and Glass, an online multimedia publication started in 2020 in Toledo, all intend to fill a gap in the literary world.
As publishing companies across the region work to publish more contemporary Midwestern literature and criticism, they are defining what “authentic Midwestern literature” means for a new generation.
“There’s a lot of connecting factors in the Midwest: this sort of humbleness in writing, not necessarily making ourselves the star, quiet, contemplative,” Russell said. “We find that Midwestern literature is often less about plot and more about the characterization in these quiet moments. There’s a lot of tenacity in Midwestern literature.”
He also noted the brutal winters and extreme weather conditions of places like Minnesota or Wisconsin often evoke a deep physical and emotional connection to nature. And while it may be a cliché to characterize the Midwest by its cornfields, Russell believes that there is inspiration to be found in long stretches of land and unending fields of crops.
And here I must stop. You may have wished I had stopped way up there. Sorry, I think this is an important subject for me and for Midwestern writers. I do need to get onto other things. I can be proud of only one thing today: I finished the first draft of a short story! Writers, get to it.
sch
11/7/22
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