Again with People From Bloomington - Midwestern Novel?

 This is the second time I have seen Indiana Anomie: Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington

Darma is particularly fascinated with the overlooked and forgotten people on the margins of American life. At the end of each story in People from Bloomington, the reader feels deeply for the characters and their despair, perhaps because their hopelessness feels just a couple wrong moves away from one’s own ordinary life. At the same time, you hope to forget their names when you turn the page. Darma’s marginal characters don’t fit into an uncomplicated redemption arc. They are often vile and malicious, uncaring and self-serving. They may have a glimmer of redemption in their hearts, but only once they have exhausted their petulance.

Despite his assertion that that the characters from People from Bloomington could have been drawn from any place in the world, Darma perceived, as an outsider, an emerging attitude towards the recluses on the edges of an ordinary Midwestern city. People from Bloomington feels like a report from the early days of the great American unwinding of civic responsibility and sense of interconnectedness. His characters are unsettling because they are recognizable—if not in our communities, then in ourselves. Darma doesn’t let us look away.

The first post was People from Bloomington.

Guess I need to add this to my Need to Read List. 

sch 11/27/22 

Updated

Found today on the American Scholar site, Indiana Absurd, which looks like a podcast.

sch