Who Will Kick Over The Bounds Of Indiana's Literary Past?

 This post's title comes from reading Small-Town Sex: Colm Tóibín on John Broderick (The Paris Review). Particularly this paragraph instigated this bit of writing:

John Broderick was born in Athlone in the Irish midlands in 1924. He was an only child, expected to take over the family’s thriving bakery. He was brought up in a large house, and, while he worked intermittently as a book reviewer, he had a private income and did not have to bother too much about the literary market. In a posthumously published story, he described himself as “the first author to tap a hitherto neglected mine of material. Irish life up to this time had been treated as if it consisted of a passionately poetic peasantry, and a romantically rakish Anglo-Irish gentry. The solid, Jansenistic, purse-proud, insular, ruthless, hypocritical, conservative junta which has emerged as the ruling class since the [1916] Rebellion, has remained unchronicled for the simple reason that it had not produced a renegade of genius from within its own ranks.”

 I know I am not that person - too old, too ham-handed a writer, too many other things wrong with me as a writer - but I do think there is a story to tell of life in this area of the Midwest. 

Nor do I think drawing parallels between conservative Ireland and conservative is far-fetched. Under the surface of clean-faced, commonsensical, sentimental Hoosiers there is violence, superstition, and desperation. We have a drug culture, we have political corruption, and there is plenty of hypocrisy about both. We do not have official censorship; we prefer to make it untenable for those with an education to find work in the state. We do not have the Roman Catholic Church imposing morals, but we do have our Evangelical Protestants.

Moreover, the stories that could be told about Indiana apply to the country as a whole. It would be the task of using a part to tell a larger story.

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