Bonus Points for the Anthology: State by State, a Panoramic Portrait of America

I think I mentioned early on when I resolved for 2009 to read a book set in, concerning the history of, or written by an author from each State, that I felt undermined to discover that Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had pretty much had the same idea in 2008. The two Mr. W's brought together 51 young, talented and often award-winning writers (with an occasional cartoonist, actor and chef thrown in for good measure) to do an updated, more personal reprise of the WPA's American Guide series created through the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. (And here I am, a would-be author, dealing with the latest depression recovery/stimulus funds as a government worker and the only writing I do is to compress grant announcements and summarize award recipients for web page content, hardly either personal or insightful about my home State.)

Statistically, the two Mr. W's pulled together a stronger selection of excellent storytellers than my effort to identify 51 books wherein the essence of a place played the lead role. Of the 50+ I plowed through this year, 20 earned solid high marks, the kind of books you grab someone by the shoulder and say "read this book," or better yet, you lend your copy to a friend who has a long bus commute to work each day. In State by State (SxS), more than half hit the bull's eye and only about a dozen made their States so boring that they wouldn't seem worth the trip, whether land-based or across the written page.

I thought it would be fun to align my preferences from this anthology against my rankings of the 50 State list I compiled, to see if there was something in a State, per se, that emerged irrespective of how or who wrote about. (See I am too much of a governmental bureaucrat, thinking my statistics will be meaningful, but thankfully, too much of a budding-writer to acknowledge that this was a pointless exercise.) Nonetheless, Florida came through in both top rankings. I've already extolled Susan Orlean for showing that the crimes of her orchid thieves had to take place in the Floridian swamps. Here, Joshua Ferris writes about how it was to grow up on the Florida Keys after relocating from Illinois in the mid-80s. He recalls an almost Huckleberry Finn kind of childhood, with open water, including swimming in the front yard during the eye of his first hurricane, with societal fringe neighbors and employers, and with his discovery that even after personally meeting Jimmy Buffet, his adulthood began with a car ride singing American Pie. (By the way, Susan Orlean also contributed to State by State but for Ohio where she grew up, and sorry Susan, compared to The Orchid Thief, this essay wasn't as compelling.)

Will Blythe writes of New Hampshire, as a native North Carolinian currently living in New York City, not as a resident, exile or transplant. He compares his appreciation of NH thus: "Maybe as a traveler, I'm like a mistress to a great man; my nocturnal privileges allow me to know things the good wife can only dream." Blythe is broad in his essay: writing of religious history, transcendentalism, frost heaves, and the forty varieties of silence in the State -- sort of like the number of shades of green in Eire. It has the same look, feel and people that I found in Irving's Hotel New Hampshire.

Other renderings in SxS glistened and lured me into the highly visual landscapes and made interesting people attractive, in contrast to many more mediocre stories from my blog list. Lydia Millet leaves New York City for Arizona and immediately buys a house in the desert "where the horrible meets the divine." She makes the scenery spectacular and the distances immeasurable, but it is her comparison of these geographic treasures against the diminished and marginal lives of the other local residents and the community that is drawn to the local mini-mart that fully fleshes out her place there as a transplant. Ellery Washington moved from Chicago in 1965 to Albuquerque when his father got work in the nuclear labs. As practically the only Black family in the area, his observations of New Mexico are somewhat similar to Millet's. Washington returns to New Mexico on a visit with his French boyfriend where he tour the sites of NM but discover instead his "defensive kind of local patriotism."

A short essay on Montana by Sarah Vowell is rich in history and has one of the best wrap-up lines: "memorize this line from a Richard Hugo poem set in Philipsburg so you have it handy for life's cold snaps -- "The car that brought you here still runs."

Jack Hitt lures the reader to South Carolina, the real SC, not the Colonial Williamsburg-like theme park of restored Charleston. He and his family are such generational residents, that his encounters with rich, absentee new home owners outshines their wealth and pretensions when he can name the people who previously owned each house in his neighborhood.

Alexander Payne, the man who brought us "Sideways," tours his State of Nebraska like movie's vineyard road trip, infused with humor: "that long flat State that sets between me and any place I want to go ... in fact, you're probably just skimming though this chapter on your way to Nevada."

Yes, there are a couple of States that I think don't stack up as well. The chapters for both Oregon and Vermont are done as cartoons, I guess a new genre that young'ns find attractively concise, but which I conclude doesn't give a sense of place, despite maps and drawings, nor of how a setting and local culture impacted the author. Both Kentucky and California left me flat.

State by State was a perfect way to wrap up my 2009 book list resolution. I ventured forth on a journey to look for how essential a story's setting was to the advancement of its plot. I also wanted to see if that setting took on a unique character because it was anchored in one place or another across America. SxS, especially when read over a short period of time as I did through my second reading, shows that people need to identify with a geographical home base. Others routinely ask new acquaintances where do they come from as a kind of short hand way of placing them in a culture or history. But that is other-imposed and too often stereotypical. Daphne Beal in her essay on growing up near Milkwaukee says her DNA is encoded "WISC." Neighborhood, town, and eventually State, become a more than a stage setting or backdrop for peoples' lives. The symbol of family trees implies family roots, roots that take hold and nourish memories.

January 8, 2010
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr (Idaho)
I hesitate to mix look-backs to the 2009 list with picaresque reviews, so I'm going to tag onto the State by State write-up things I have to say about authors I discovered through theses essays.
Last night I finished a wonderful small travelogue, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, by Anthony Doerr (Idah0). He won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, receiving the letter telling him the morning he returns from the hospital after his wife gives birth to twin boys. They pack them up and go. There are so many perspectives interwoven seamlessly: not knowing Italian, getting writers block and being diverted into reading all of Pliny instead of writing, coping with the physical exhaustion of two infants, and of course, the sights, smells and history of Rome.

Two passages quoted below struck me not only for their insights but the power of Doerr's composition:

"Habitualization ... Viktor Shklovsky wrote ... devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife ... What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things ... Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack ... A good journal entry ... ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience ... become new all over again."

"Every story seeks, in Emerson's words, the invisible and imponderable. Faith, loss, emotional contact. But to get there, oddly enough, the storyteller must use the visible, the physical, the eminently tangible: the reader, first and foremost, must be convinced. And details -- the right details in the right places -- are what do the convincing ... a writer ... hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell and hear a world that seems complete in itself ... builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back, and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe ... A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story ... is for the reader ... A writer manufactures a dream. And each draft should present a version of that dream that is more precisely rendered and more consistently sustained than the last. Every morning I try to remind myself to give unreservedly, to pore over everything, to test each sentence for fractures in the dream."

Seeing a new world through the opening eyes of his twins, and so committed to excellence in observation, style and purpose, Doerr doesn't need to be standing atop the Janiculum Hill to be head and shoulders above the mass of contemporary authors.

January 9, 2010
The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett (Tennessee)
This book has a crackerjack beginning. My hands were almost shaking from the tension that Patchett builds up with the opening crisis as Sabine's husband Parsifal dies. Thinking this book would be a natural compare and contrast for the face to face book club's reading of Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (even with such a similar title), I eagerly read on. Soon Sabine is dreaming fantastical dreams about Parsifal's true love Phan, dreams that are exceptionally comforting if a tad ominous. After Parsifal's will is probated, she learns he had changed his name from Guy Fetters (harken to irons imprisoning him) and he has family in Nebraska in stark contrast to what she had been led to believe, that his well to do parents died in a car crash in Connecticut. His mother contacts her; they connect in Sabine's grief and she eventually flies to Nebraska to stay with them for several weeks. As she comes to learn of the horror of Guy's early life, and to see it repeated before her eyes in the family's successive generation, she dreams less of Phan and Parsifal and their beautiful life and home in Los Angeles and their travels and professional successes. The absence of those dreams diminishes the tale. Sabine's mourning would not pass without some sense of renewal and rebirth, but leaving her in Nebraska at the abrupt end of the novel has reality bite. Her card trick at her sister-in-law's wedding, while a milestone for her in terms of difficulty, falls flat on the wedding guests and seems to be little consolation for her resuming her life on the West Coast alone. With an open invitation to her other sister-in-law to come back to LA with her, with her architectural models collecting dust unfinished in Phan's mansion, and with her parents taking care of Parsifal's overweight white rabbit, Sabine seems stalled, waiting for another night time trance to move her out of the drifts of Nebraska.

A Look Back: The Best from 2009

I have never put together a retrospective that ranks the books I have read over the course of a year. Probably, because when I was reading a biography/memoir for each letter of the alphabet, selecting the top ten hardly seemed a meritorious distinction. With a field of 51 States, several of which had alternate selections, I have a large enough pool to make "piles" that make sense to me.

Strangely, 9 were my favorites and I added a tenth, like all good annual reviews, simply for transitional purposes. Here goes:

1. Florida: The Orchid Thief. This story could not have taken place anywhere else. The swamps with their unique flowers and Indian culture is not only the setting but the motive for these crimes. In addition, the author writes of an off-resort landscape that is arch-Floridian.
2. Kansas: Charlatan. Granted, this story could have taken place as readily in Missouri or any other mid-America State, but I was charmed and amused by this true crime story that is rooted in a time and a naivete of simple homespun but yet still contemporary human longings.
3. California: American Lightning. Does anyone see a pattern here? Once again, I am captivated by a true crime story of unionization and violence in America and the country's first attempts to respond to "terrorism."
4. Washington: Reservation Blues. What a joy to discover Sherman Alexie, compounded when my younger son similarly came to like this author through his short stories in his American literature class this semester where many of the same characters reappeared. Catch Alexie's recent interview on Colbert on Hulu to see his humor in action and his pride in the written word.
5. New Hampshire: Hotel New Hampshire. My first acquaintance with John Irving. Subsequently, I have discovered these themes and images recur in most of his novels, but still love the story and its rendition of New England.
6. Wisconsin: The Women. 2009 was the year I also discovered T. C. Boyle and almost became a groupie, toying with the idea of going to his lecture in Peekskill his fall when he was engaged for part of the 400 year celebrations of Henry Hudson's discoveries. Boyle surpasses the other version of Frank Lloyd Wright's loves and life, Loving Frank, that next to The Women, comes across as a provincial history, lacking in distance and assessment.
7. Illinois: Sin in the Second City. A good book to read after Charlatan to continue to venture into early 20th Century American vice. Also a great contrast to 21st Century New York legislative dysfunction.
8. Hawaii: Letters from Hawaii. Mark Twain at his funniest tethered to nonfiction.
9. Vermont: First (and Second and Third, etc) Person Rural. So quiet, so contemplative, so Vermont. A journal of day to day living in simplicity and community.
10. Rhode Island: Theophilus North. My tenth "force-fit" only as an unanticipated segue into 2010's list of picaresque novels.

Another 10 are books I would not hesitate to strongly recommend to anyone looking for a great read set in an interesting place with unforgettable characters and an author with a powerful writing style: Crazy in Alabama, Meet You in Hell (Pa), The Billionaire's Vinegar (Va), Citizen Coors, The Last Good Time (NJ), The Next Step in the Dance (La), Down River (NC), The Sky Fisherman (Or),The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (Tn), and The Worst Hard Time (Ok).

Next will be my attempt to compare these top 20 State stories with those in the anthology, State by State.

An Unanticipated Segue to 2010: Theophilus North in Newport for the Summer of '26

I finished all 50 States, plus DC, at 2:45 PM on Tuesday, December 22. With the last minute rush of the holidays, and a need to take a deep relaxing breath, I've put off writing up the last review. But here goes:

Theophilus North was the last novel written by Thornton Wilder in 1973. It is heavily autobiographical and a look-back of almost 50 years. The hero of the story, Ted North, summers in Newport but only as an ancillary to the moneyed class that inhabits the cottages/mansions, as the tennis and French instructor for their children and as a professional reader to those too infirm, agoraphobic, or "entitle" to find amusement and interests out of doors. Wilder employs two structure devices on which to hang his tales: paralleling the city of Newport to the nine cities of ancient Troy and the motives of his protagonist, to his childhood ambitions and the attractions of nine possible careers: as a missionary, anthropologist, archaeologist, detective, actor, magician, lover, and my favorite, rascal/"el picaro."

To quote at length from Chapter One, Wilder's description of a rogue:
"... el picaro ... the man who lives by his wits, “one step ahead of the sheriff,” without plan, without ambition, at the margin of decorous living, delighted to outwit the clods, the prudent, the money-obsessed, the censorious, the complacent. I dreamt of covering the entire world, of looking into a million faces, light of foot, light of purse and baggage, extricating myself from predicaments of hunger, cold and oppression by quickness of mind. These are not only the rogues, but the adventurers. I had read, enviously, the lives of many and had observed that they were often, justly or unjustly, in prison. My instinct had warned me and my occasional nightmares had warned me that the supreme suffering for me would be that of being caged and incarcerated. I have occasionally approached the verge of downright rascality, but not without carefully weighing the risk.”

Ever since I introduced T.C. Boyle's Mungo Park to my book club and was surprised by their quite Victorian reaction to his escapades with native sexual practices, I decided that the blog for 2010 would be nothing but picaresque novels. Imagine my surprise to find Theophilus just as intent on being a rogue. In the next couple of days, I will post the list of randy adventurous books I have culled for next year's resolution. And I guess the theme is not that far afield from 2009. This year, I had been looking to validate that where a story happened was not incidental to its outcome. But passing through all the States has been a journey of sorts. Picaresque novels per se have a voyage overlay.

As I progress into the next resolution, I am looking for books that typify that personal voyage, one where the main character, through all his or her missteps, encounters unbelievable characters and situations, placing himself/herself in temptation if not risk, and gaining wisdom and personal insight thereby. That is the standard against which I will assess the novels next year.

But before that list, I will post two more reviews for 2009: one my first assessment of which of the 51+ from the States met or exceeded what I was looking to find (the centrality of location) and how my list aligns against that of the bonus book, State by State, the 2008 published anthology of 50 authors' treatment for each State. I'm interested to see if my preferences for a State from this book match those on our list, to see if there is anything intrinsic about a State that makes it prime real estate for literature.

Open Space and Quiet People

Idaho, sheep, 1917 with the threat of being drafted looming over the just-beginning life of Walter Pascoe. Well, that just about does it for my review. This is a first novel, written in 2003, by a young author named Heather Parkinson, whom it seems has not published another. This book is so down-shifted, it is laconic. Three-fourths of the book has minimal dialogue ... the most intense back and forth is between Walter and his fellow soldiers on the train as they return home from France. Prior to that, he hardly speaks to his parents, boss or fiancee. So does anything compensate for this introspection? Not really. The description of sheep herding is distanced and hardly rooted in the visceral. Walter's mother's illness and his father's life as a merchant in a small town is not portrayed as influencing his life decisions. Everything is withheld ... his fiancee never tells him she is pregnant when he is drafted, never writes to tell him she lost the baby. If it weren't so late in December, I'd actively look for an alternative to represent the State; but, my interest is in Rhode Island and getting ready for 2010.

Neo-Gothic Southern

I raced through John Hart's Edgar award-winning mystery Down River in less than a day. (A much better investment of time than engaging in Black Friday bedlam.) The Slackers did not select that many murder mysteries as they tend to be our "default" genre when we don't have another reading theme. But this story is captivating. It faintly echoes The Sky Fisherman in its focus on the importance of a river to a family's history. It is more tightly written with more changes in its flow than Cache of Corpses. I have already reserved the two other Hart mysteries from the library, both set in North Carolina as well.

Like so many of our other books, Hart has his main character, Adam Chase, leave home -- actually driven away by his father's choice to side with Adam's stepmother. (Clever pun in the name, Adam being expelled from his paradise and then chasing his family history and sins.) The gentility of his Southern aristocratic estate bucks violently against the marginalized population of the county who live in swamps, manufacture meth, and incur outrageous gambling debts. As these allures tempt and encroach on his family and friends, providing motivation for several acts of violence, Hart also interweaves a motive of financial opportunities, the siting of a nuclear power plant along the river, as a force of evil to not only the status quo but to the land itself.

And like the best of murder mysteries, Adam has his own devastating back story to deal with, whether to reconcile himself to being ostracized by almost everyone in the county, to redeem his destroyed reputation, and to reconnect with the woman he left behind.

While North Carolina does not play as critical a role in Down River as Florida does in The Orchid Thief, it does come across as vitally important to plot development and intrudes more than say Alabama does in Crazy in Alabama. The place does not make the characters act as they do, but the location colors the perspectives of the inhabitants, and constrains the choices they can make.

December 5, 2009: Surroundings as Facade: The King of Lies

This is John Hart's first murder mystery, also set in Salisbury, Rowan County, North Carolina. Once you've read two books by the same author, you tend to see if there are any recurring themes, plots or characters. Like Down River, TKOL is high neo-Gothic, with a "genteel" wealthy Southern family that is controlled by a Tennessee Williams' type of Big Daddy; and in which the son comes to not only despise him but nearly to die from his hatred. However, I my thoughts comparing this book to others on the States' list, I find it evocative of Hotel New Hampshire, with violent rape, sibling's attempts at suicide, and deceased, idolized mother.

It is an excellent mystery, just a tad below Down River if only for its too pat ending. As far as place affecting the tale, North Carolina is less vital in this book. Hart portrays surroundings as highly constructed facades and his lead character, Work Pickens, as a too willing participant in the charade. All characters have been assigned roles by the despotic father, Ezra Pickens, with the town also under his mystique. Hart uses the simile of a frog staying in a pan of boiling water and not jumping out as long as the frog was put in when the water was tepid and only gradually heated. But because Work and his sister Jean are so emotionally destroyed by Ezra, a better simile might be the progressive ingestion of lead paint from the old peeling family manor. They are driven crazy, one to alcohol, the other to bouts of self-destruction. Ezra, his money, his estate all have to be obliterated for the characters to become whole. Jean moves from away from North Carolina but Work finds peace in farming the land nearby.

Another Step in the Dance Much Farther North

As I mentioned in the last review I posted -- for Indiana -- I am closing in on finishing the States and taking time to assess the year long effort, how the books stack against each other, and what I got out of this themed resolution for 2009. I certainly ended up reading more stories about Native Americans than I normally would have chosen from our local library. And if they are a sub-genre of larger American lit, I found them more provocative than some of the stories set in mainstream mid-America during the early decades of the Twentieth Century.

The Grass Dancer begins with a few untitled pages introducing Harley, a Dakota Indian, as he recalls a dream about his father and brother. Immediately, the book moves on to a short story set in 1981 where Harley meets a young half-breed girl from Illinois who has traveled to the Dakota powwow to dance. More of Harley's friends and family are introduced but the tale ominously ends in another car crash, recalling the one hinted at in the introduction.

What I liked most about this novel is how Susan Power quickly got the reader curious about Harley and how these tragedies came about and would effect his life. The second and subsequent half dozen chapters keep going farther and farther back into tribal and family history, 1977, 1961, all the way back to 1864, and each presents a vignette on an invent on another Dakota that is as life-altering as Harley's. In the last two chapters, Power returns to 1981 and ties these traditions and lore to Harley becoming an adult.

Many of the subplots included in the other books on the States list that have Native Americans as main characters are found here as well: the compromises to maintain their religious beliefs and view of the Earth when confronted with aggressive Catholicism; a similar tension between contemporary and native music; and the inevitability of alcoholism and its associated physical dangers as brought on by underemployment.

Never having been to the Dakotas, I find it impossible to distinguish whether Powell's depiction of the terrain is applicable only to that State. However, what she succeeds in doing is making the place magical. Features of the landscape are alive, speaking a continuous and cohesive language to those open to listen. It is reverent.

The Waxing and Waning of Place: The Magnificient Ambersons

Sometimes looking back over 2009, I feel like these 50+ books are falling like coins in one of those sorting machines that are now located in the front of the grocery store: more Native American stories, more period pieces, and dare I say, more slugs than I expected. I am sorely disappointed in The Magnificient Ambersons. This is the second Pulitzer Prize winner on the list that didn't seem that engaging to me.

Booth Tarkington won in 1919 and this is the story of a place and a family that respectively move from quaint town to industrial city, and from landed gentry to to manual labor and SROs. It focuses on George Amberson Minafer, a gilded age youth, who is a coddled bully growing up and a pompous effected snob as he matures. He haughtiness is amplified when the Morgans move back to town. Mr. Morgan is a former boyfriend of George's mother and Morgan's daughter becomes George's love interest. Both relationships are destroyed because of George's vanity.

Meanwhile, Tarkington has the town grow, prosper and get covered with soot. The Amberson's too set in their patrician ways cannot deign to participate in industrialization, except on the speculative investment end. You can predict their fall to ruin.

The story construction is detached, wry observation in the first part, moving to more critical portrayal of George as protagonist, and finally to a denouement that seems horribly contrived and jarring. You do not want to see George redeemed or Morgan forgiving. As written, TMA seems dated, a book appealing to an audience rushing into the Roaring Twenties but still believing in a happy, tidy ending.

There is no sense of Indiana per se, just another unnamed mid-Western town like the one in Babbitt. Tarkington is steeped in class rather than place as controlling his characters' motives and actions. Maybe I should have read Hoosiers.

Who Owns Family History, or Writing Away Guilt

The Ghost in the Little House, by William Holtz, an English professor at the University of Missouri, put me back into my more typical reading frame of mind as it is a scholarly biography of Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of "Prairie" stories fame. I never read the Little House stories, being more a Nancy Drew type of girl and when Michael Landon did the TV series, it seems quite the domesticated come-down from his exciting single life on Bonanza, so I didn't watch that either. So, I went into this book without any major preconceived notions except the obvious: Laura was the author. Wrong, Rose was.

Holtz builds this case almost day by day. If I had been clever, I would have flipped to the appendix where there are actual side by side comparisons of what Laura sent to her libraries as her longhand versions and what was published. Then the nuances would have had more an effect of a loud speaker announcement. Rose ghost wrote for many other famous contemporaries including Lowell Thomas so her credentials and publishing successes are documented. She also had columns and short serialized stories running in Ladies Home Journal, Woman's Day and other newspapers and magazines, on topics that ran the gamut from a history of American needlepoint to one of the first well articulated tracts on Libertarianism to her own recollections of farm life in Missouri.

Not only was there are ranging breadth to Rose's writing, Holtz himself has several concurrent themes to weave together and he does so in such a way as to let Rose's powerful turn of phrase reign through numerous quotations from her letters and journals. But his own writing is as strong to support the life long conflicts and compromises between daughter and mother, to connect a family's history and values to the larger American pioneering experience, to contrast those national, innate values with world events and other cultures through Rose's wanderings, and to carry these themes across personal time as Rose's ideology matures. She was eccentric, perhaps manic depressive, and starved to recreate a loving parental experience. She relived her grandparents' and parents' uprootings and relocations on a much grander, international scale, compelled by example to build and remodel house after house, always trying to create a perfect home.

This was a book where every couple of pages I glued in a post it note to highlight an especially poignant paragraph. I enjoyed one of my favorite biography games: who turns up unexpectedly. While there are many cameo appearances, I limit my citations to those "hits" from the 50 state list -- Rose's husband is described as earning his money by babbitry, and both Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson are Rose's friends.

And of all these passages I marked, I will cite only one that hit closest to home: "The scholar must acquire a taste for old book reviews, but in this case the reviews matter less for what they tell us about the books, many now forgotten, than for what they reveal about the reviewer." As I near the end of the list, I am going through my reviews and trying to sort my preferences into broad categories of "loved it, liked it or eh." I am finding that despite doing my best to use only the criterion of how well the State as place was depicted as an agent in the story, there are too many other characteristics of style and plot that I personally value. So at the end, I will do a review of the reviews ... sort of like Rose's end of the year journal entries ... to see what I accomplished and what I learned about myself in 2009.

Maybe I Collect States

Somehow I managed to put off reading The Orchid Thief to the last handful of states left on the Slackers’ list. Intentionally too, because I thought this was yet another Southern novel about vaporous women. When I went to the library and picked up the remaining six or seven titles, I started with South Dakota, put it down, and skimmed the back cover for Susan Orlean’s book. Wow! It’s “true crime.” I finished it in less than two days.

Orlean comes to Florida to do a follow-up story on three men arrested for stealing endangered, protected orchids from the swamps. The man behind this caper is John Larouche who believes that by having two Seminole Indians as partners in crime, he is covered from prosecution, or at least assured of being acquitted. While that incident is the “pseudobulb” germinating her book, Orlean devotes more of it to trying to understand the impulse to collect, the history of dubious land speculation and development, and the effect of a flat, inhospitable, vegetative landscape on the behavior of its indigenous and transplanted residents.

Much more than many of the Slackers’ state books, in the The Orchid Thief, Florida is a main character. Her description of the fear and fascination of black water sink holes with poisonous snakes, alligators and swarming insects is far removed from a visit to Busch Gardens. Her interpretation of the urges of rare plant collectors leads her to more universal insights into the conflicting human needs to do something to set oneself apart while still belonging to a community doing the same thing, even if it means not being a member in good standing. She cleverly weaves these two themes together: "I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone ... I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size."

The Orchard Thief reminded me of The Billionaire’s Vinegar and the history of Dupont’s creating Winterthur, and strangely enough, about the great Mormon migration. I recently read a short article on the Internet that reported that research scientists have discovered that compulsive collecting and hoarding is genetic. Whether spending thousands of dollars to discover and own a new variety of orchid or to bid on a rare bottle of wine, these collectors are purchasing status -- as the items themselves are destined to remain in atmospherically corrected homes and displayed or shared selectively, only by invitation. There is nothing public about their collections, other than the notoriety they garner from successfully beating other obsessive – compulsives in this game of acquisition.

Winterthur is a public garden. Dupont collected just as single-mindedly but to create something beyond his immediate personal space. He is cultivating landscape, but one that does not need to be tamed or risk reverting to the wild.

Maybe because vacationers from the North rarely venture into the still wild interior of Florida, it is difficult to think of it in terms beyond sandy beaches and groomed golf courses. Orlean compares its threatening rawness against the wide open spaces of the West, concluding Florida is just as much, if not more, omninous: "The pioneers out west were crossing wide plains and mountain ranges that were too open and endless for one set of eyes to take in ... The pioneer-adventurers in south Florida were traveling inward, into a place as dark and dense as steel wool, a place that already held an overabundance of living things ... To explore such a place you had to vanish into it ... it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear."

Orlean does all she can not to be tempted to become a collector herself. She describes orchids as beautiful deformities, often looking like scary people or threatening animals. But still she hunts for the elusive ghost orchid. She similarly describes Larouche as an attractive yet toothless, hyperactive, and undependable man, but nevertheless someone she needs to track and discover. The people in her book and the setting are more like Tim Burton's view of Florida than it is like Disneyland, images that are so burned in your mind, you don't need postcards.

Elemental: Fire and Water

Craig Lesley's novel set in Oregon, The Sky Fisherman, reminds me of at least two of the other States books. Hot on the heels of the Alabama craziness, this is a story of a boy whose father died in the Lost River and whose ambitious mother is married to a man whose career with the railroad has been shunted to a sideline. She eventually leaves him to move to a town where her first husband's brother lives, to have him help her raise Culver. So this is a story of a boy seeking a male role model, all of whose flaws, even crimes, temper his maturation. For the blog's purposes, here is a story where one of the characters intentionally selects the place to define her son's history and opportunities.

It also has a parallel story of the local Indian reservation, reminiscent of Alexie Sherman. The juxtaposition of the town's and tribe's police force as they deal with major arson and catastrophic floods sets the speed of the book, relying on Native American time and perspective of events and land.

Because the plot develops so languidly and many mysteries remain unsolved at its conclusion, the book is haunting. The story does have a decidedly male perspective: they work in a sporting goods store, take people out on the Lost River as fishing guides, volunteer as firefighters. Women, other than Culver's mother, who is a tad one-dimensional in her ambition, play supporting roles to the much more actively engaged men ... maybe with the exception of the hobos. It is a rugged book, where place is a challenge and a struggle to master after pitting oneself against the elements and the storms from personal failings.

Crazy About this Storyteller

Ah, where to start. So, this morning I opened up the book again to see what to write about because the story and the characters are wonderful and unforgettable (to sound trite). So there as his inspiration are two quotes that could not have anything in common except to Childress: Lewis Carroll's Alice observing that in Wonderland, they're dreadfully fond of beheading people and Martin Luther King opining on the need to march in prayer pilgrimages. Then on the first page of the story, Peejoe, now a grown up Peter Joseph, admits to putting the scene from Vertigo on endless loop where Kim Kovak forsakes Jimmy Stewart and drives off in her green sedan.

Okay, now you know what happens in Crazy in Alabama, right? Orphaned PeeJoe and his older brother Wiley are being raised by their grandmother, MeeMaw, in Pigeon Creek, surrounded by eccentric uncles in the family business, funerals, and a frustrated, fertile (of both body and mind) Aunt Lucille. Lucille, like -- in Next Step in the Dance, is compulsive about leaving Alabama and going to California to become a movie star. When she deserts her six children and dumps them on MeeMaw, PeeJoe and Wiley get shunted off to Uncle Dove, to Industry where racial tensions are escalating. Keeping both the adventures of Lucille and PeeJoe running parallel, the craziness spreads to all.

I'm sure if I spent more time this morning, I would find many more allusions to classical literature. But the novel is outrageously funny despite its themes of murder and oppression. There is no attempt to make the characters "speak Southern" nor are there references to family recipes or descriptions of geography. Rather it is the way they express themselves relating to their surroundings, neighbors and place in history that makes this book resonate as both essentially Alabaman and American. This book belongs at the top of the Slackers' list, and not just alphabetically.

Is Satire Set in Time?

I finished Babbitt two States ago and have found it difficult to review. It is set in 1920 and is obviously a satire about aspiring middle class men with commonplace pretensions. Babbitt is a realtor in Zenith, a midsized town in the mid-West. His house looks like everyone else's in his neighborhood; he attends the same clubs as his peers; he espouses political views only after reading about them on the editorial page.

Sinclair Lewis over-draws Babbitt and his family and friends to ridicule the pettiness of their lives. Even when Babbitt has his mid-life crisis, commits adultery with a radical widow and imbibes of bootleg booze, it is all seen as a farce. Babbitt's return to the fold of conservatism and boosterism at the book's end is equally derided.

When I started the book, the word "jaunty" kept popping up in my mind. So did the style remind me of Thurber, Woodhouse, or even Kingsley Ames ... not Swift or Pope. Yes, Babbitt's foibles are human but his predicament is too time-dependent to come across as universal.

Lewis is sharp in his ear for dialogue. He replicates banality perfectly. There is only so much of this that is tolerable. After a while, it is like Ed TV or too much My Space. Sorry, Slackers. You can't even get an idea that this is Minnesota, or make-believe Minnesota.

Oh, That Sharon McCrumb?

I'm bad with names. This seems illogical for an English major who had to be able to identify an author from a brief extract. Could do it then, but even then, there were hints that faces would impress me more than last names. So, I was extremely surprised after finishing The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and reading about Sharon McCrumb to realize I had already read two of her previous award-winning books: Bimbos of the Death Sun and If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. I don't remember especially liking them, especially the first, but maybe because I read it when I was recuperating, received as a distraction from one of the Slackers. Another Slacker recommended Hangman's Daughter. This time I was seduced into the story after a paragraph or two.

McCrumb populates Dark Hollow, Tennessee with eccentric but believable people. The story is complicated in the interweaving of community lives, history, folklore, classical Shakespearean parallel plots, and myth. All pulled off quite readily and unobtrusively. The characters are contemporary archetypes: wives separated from their husbands off at war; veterans still lost in mental battlefields; rejoined childhood friends; and a wise woman who foresees the future.

The hangman referred to is the name of a mountain not the trade of a local citizen, and as such it very well could be that Nora Bonestell, the woman with insight, need not be the only beautiful daughter in town. Certainly the minister's wife, Laura Bruce has characteristics that shine. So does the heroic Tammy Robsart has qualities that are heroic beyond her young age. Even Maggie Underhill, the most tested of all the female characters, is sympathetically tragic.

This is not to say that McCrumb portrays women better than she describes the men who populate this small village in Appalachia. Tavy and Taw are champions of their town and keeping it as they remember from boyhood. The sheriff and his assistant have offbeat personal quirks and demons.

Besides all this powerful storyline and characterization, the book evokes a place. McCrumb often alludes to the pull of the hollers and mountains, calling prodigals back from big cities and compelling residents to rebuild on the same lot after each flood. There is no forced dialect, no reference to local food. Only a cycle of changing landscape, by season and by time. The isolation and simplicity of the community stands out by contrasting it with the war in the Middle East and how long it still takes to drive to North Carolina.

Comparing it to The Red Helmet, the Slacker selection for Kentucky, which also has a female lead trying to come to terms with her marriage causing her relocation into a new place, Hangman's, despite it's being classified in the mystery genre, is a more peaceful, real but illusionary State.

I will remember Sharon McCrumb's name now and seek out more of her stories.

Organized Crime -- A Year of Homicides in Baltimore

I fancy myself as a compulsive organizer: I recently cleaned out my dressers and arranged my sweaters first by season/weight and then by color. Did the same with my bras, reminiscent of displays at Victoria's Secret. When I need to fall asleep on a restless night, I mentally go through the plants in my perennial garden alphabetically. And then, of course, there is the "logic" of this year's reading resolution to plow through a book about each state in the union. So, the idea of writing a chronological book about the Baltimore homicide detectives by a newspaper reporter who embedded himself into their division in 1988 appealed to me. Unfortunately, this mechanism doesn't work for me.

David Simon, writing the police beat for the Baltimore Sun, shadowed the city's detectives for a year of 234 murders. Despite listening a cast of characters in the front of the book, not many of them emerge with dimensions other than those of a cop. They, like the days and the deaths and perpetrators, with few exceptions, all merge together. Standing out only is an internal investigation of a detective who might have been shot by another officer and the never-ending interrogation of a suspected child murderer. Their efforts drone on with a "killing" daily rhythm. Crimes appear to be solved by a streak of luck. Doggedness and excellent crime solving skills are meaningless when district attorneys acknowledge the evidence is too complicated for the typical sub-par jury.

It is only when Simon pulls back to interpret what's going on that insights prevail: his analysis of how the cops use Miranda to their advantage. His recitation of rule number nine on the impossible odds of winning a prosecution is succinct: 9A "to a jury, any doubt is reasonable" 9B "the better the case, the worse the jury" and 9C "a good man is hard to find, but twelve of them, gathered together in one place, is a miracle." Given the time period covered, the squads are all male and Simon describes the bounding and lack of personal privacy that is cultivated in this camaraderie.

When I gave my reading list for the year to my boss to introduce him to my other life as an avid reader and blogger, the only book that appealed to him, the only one he read and enjoyed was Homicide. So maybe, like the western cowboy story I chose to represent North Dakota, this must be a genre that is more masculine than what I typically enjoy. Juxtaposed against the upper Michigan peninsula murder mystery, this true crime story emphasizes the mundane, boring work of policemen. It also does not give a unique sense of locality. Baltimore could be any big crime ridden city. It demarks a time, rather than a place. Subtitled, "a year on the killing streets" seemed almost to be composed in "real time" -- I had to renew the book several times to get through its almost 600 pages. I think I need to come up with an alternate for Maryland for the Slackers.

Hippee for Yoopers – Geocaching in the Upper Peninsula

Yes, I am running on empty. I have left my tour of the fifty states by the side of the road as I concentrated on affairs of the hearth and, when time permitted, got a head start on the books selected for the upcoming year for my face-to-face book club. Actually, I’ve just been unfocused and really needing a break.

But occasionally I have plowed through another day or two with the homicide cops in Baltimore, put them in pending again, and headed off for an easy murder mystery read set in Michigan.

Henry Kisor’s third book in his series about a small town sheriff’s office is Cache of Corpses. Herein I read about geocaching, a sport previously unbeknownst to me: sort of like a scavenger hunt but without collecting trinkets. Kisor takes the sport to its XTREME level where the searchers come upon headless and handless bodies.

The story follows a predictable murder-mystery recipe: interesting main character, Steve Martinez; complicated personal life; quirky fellow policemen; quaint townspeople suspicious of outsiders; serial killer profiler; tension between local and federal law enforcement. (By George, I think I could write one of these.) But Kisor is an engaging writer, if not shockingly original … I mean in terms of style not subject. Only once, and admittedly in a critical development, does the story not hang together and that is when the investigators come to suspect geocaching in the first place.

And so, what makes this story quintessentially Michigan Upper Peninsula? There is a respect for the unique features of the land and the locals’ devotion to keeping them from becoming mere tourist attractions. There is plenty of reflection on native American and first Scandinavian settlers. There is regional slang … never heard of a Yooper before (think UP, duh).

But after so many states, I have distilled from each a more comprehensive appreciation of America per se. It is through several almost innate qualities that Americans express themselves in whatever home the book's characters come from: their identification and appreciation of local history; their struggle to fit in to their surroundings and not be perceived as an outsider; the importance of being able to array the social structure of the community and understand each person’s supporting role in it. Maybe if I were to read a book about every county in Ireland or every province in Canada, I would discover the same humanity.

Kisor will not enter the ranks of my favorite murder mystery writers, but it was a quick escape to an isolated part of a state far from home.

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Berrys Versus Beans: Another Eccentric New England Family - The Hotel New Hampshire

I have fallen into the bad habit of checking out Wiki before I write my review. It seems a bogus kind of research, as it is too often cliff notes for students who would never pick up the book. Nonetheless, the depth and complexity of this novel makes me want to quickly introduce all the remarkable characters and the clever symbolism Irving employs. Other Internet summaries tick off Irving's recurring theme of bears, wrestling and distant or absent parents, aligning them with his biographical experiences. So, go to these sites for the synopsis; this review will be more introspectively analytical.

The motif that I culled out of the story is one of making something good out of something bad. A lot of the times this has to do with physical things: Frank dealing with the death of the family dog through several taxidermic experiments; the father buying the closed school and converting it into the first hotel; and John reclaiming a deserted resort and making it the circle-fulfilling family estate and last "hotel." Most of the conversions, however, portray the recovery and stronger sense of self that each of the characters attain after a serious trauma. A litany of these catastrophes would turn me, if no one else, off from reading the book. However, Irving has spirits and life mantras interspersed throughout -- the mid-Western "life is never easy so do the best" philosophy of the grandfather, Iowa Bob; his mother's shrug; the wisdom of bears; and family tag lines such as walking by open windows. While the family is challenged, it is not doomed -- the message is not one of false hope.

Went back to reread my summary of the Beans of Maine, only recalling how much I disliked that family and the intentional downward spiral they create for themselves. The Berrys in contrast make their own habitat, even recreating it as best they can in Vienna. The hotels are a devise that not only keeps the family structured but also is the foundation for the novel's progress.

Back in the 80s when this book came out, and even more recently as several of his other novels have been made into movies, I shied away from reading Irving. Yes, I have a bias against contemporary authors and the manipulation of books by best seller lists and sham endorsements. But, like my caution with seeing TC Boyle's picture and falsely concluding he looked too dangerous to read, when I looked at John Irving, I thought he was too handsome to lure me into his world. The best thing coming from this year's list of States has been crossing that border of reluctance to discover two phenomenal writers who should never be regarded as merely contemporary but who are classics.

Holed Up -- With Old Ace

I think I have spent too much time in the West, between Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma and now Texas. Annie Proulx' book, That Old Ace in the Hole, is only 359 pages long but it took me months to plow through it. By the time I made it to the last 60 pages or so, the devise of its pace came through to me as essential to where Annie wants to end up: how long Bob Dollar has to be exposed to a place to make it his own.

Bob leaves Denver to work for a company looking to site hog farms in the Texas panhandle. Some are there already, befouling the land and affecting the health of downwind residents. Bob lies about why he has come to Woolybucket and ingratiates himself with the townsfolk, who only incrementally reveal themselves to him, particularly through their idiosyncrasies: quilting bees, barbwire festival, windmill construction lore. It is by these vignettes that the reader and Bob come to understand what makes this place vital despite its remoteness and economic depression.

Here the characters are hardscrabble and tenacious like those from the Dust Bowl rather than opportunists like the population of Tombstone. Those who are manipulators, excepting Bob who is portrayed more as a naif, are revenged by the community.

Proulx writing style does not dazzle nor does her plot line controvert. It is a slow, steady story that depicts a place as unique, permanently marking its residents, and essentially Texan.

Nature.2: Wyoming is not Jackson Hole

At long last, a mystery for one of the Slackers' states --Out of Range, by awarding winning author C.J. Box and the fifth in his series of mysteries solved by Joe Pickett, game warden from Saddlestring, Wyoming. In this installment, Pickett is reassigned to Jackson Hole and its development is juxtaposed up against the vast undeveloped beauty of the Continental Divide.

It's an easy, quick read with an underlying classic mystery formula: the beautiful femme fatale suspect, the evil moneyed manipulators, crusty old elk hunting guides who skirt the law, faithful if stressed family, tainted government workers. It's predictability is forgiven because Box is so good at describing the geography and expressing its grandeur and because his dialogue sounds real.

Time permitting, I will read the other four Picketts.

A Book Needing Cliff Notes -- And Die in the West

Tempted to start this review: "OK," I know who the principle players are: Earp, Holliday and the bad guys died, so. But I found this book impossible to follow. Paula Mitchell Marks is writing from a "socioeconomic" perspective. That's fine; I just finished Coors/Colorado and I recognize that there is an entire business angle going on behind many story settings. What's difficult to follow are the many ancillary characters intruding into the main ring -- Wyatt's brothers, their wives, the other "marshalls" of various jurisdictions, townsfolk, cowboys, miners, until the scenes are crammed like a Wagnerian opera, or perhaps more appropriately, like an oater with a cast of thousands.

I got the Tombstone DVD out of the library, thinking that would clarify things in my mind, and fell asleep, taking it back unwatched. I eventually did a Wiki search, and that reference itself runs to 18 pages. So, all right, it's not a cut and dried event despite America's making a mass-market legend of the gunfight at the corral.

So, I will shirk off my analysis of character motivation by quoting Marks' last paragraph: "The significance of the 'gunfight at the O.K. Corral,' then, does not lie in its existence as a morality play between 'good' lawmen and 'bad' cowboys, or between 'bad' lawmen and 'good' cowboys. Rather, the gun battle, the personalities involved in it, and the events surrounding it are significant for what they tell us about the real complexities of the western frontier experience. The story of the troubles in boom town Tombstone reminds us that the whys and wherefores of living and dying have never been as simple as we might wish them to be -- particularly in the crucible that was the American frontier west."

From the Slackers' perspective, And Die in the West is marvelous history of a place created out of nothing ... out of discovering silver and populated by prospectors and a 19th century selection of "entertainment industry" (read saloons and brothels) at which the successful could spend their money. From the conversion of tents into buildings and cow paths into roads comes the underlying theme of the story: that many of the characters arrived in Southern Arizona to get away from the restraints of Eastern civilization, only to have them come crashing too quickly into town, as mores followed money. Tombstone was a town drawn on flash paper, populated with people looking to make it big, quickly, whether through a silver stake, bullet or badge.

State as Business School Case Study -- Citizen Coors by Dan Baum

Brew it and they will come: Adolph Coors was a master beer maker and an astute businessman who regarded quality and its consistency as the pillars of his brewing company in Golden, Colorado. These traits and strict discipline imposed on his sons, created a family-run business that was paternalistic and self-sufficient. Fiercely independent and rooted in their beliefs of self-determination and tradition, the next two generations perpetuated those ideals to create a successful, regional business -- innovative engineering-wise and ahead of its contemporaries in vertically integrating its operations into energy needs, conservation and packaging. Having survived both the Great Depression and Prohibition, Coors felt invincible.

But modern threats pursued their philosophies ... unions, boycotts, pollution, governmental regulation ... a barrage of "attacks" that they fought against well into the fourth generation of citizens Coors.

Baum's book is much more balanced that the blurb back cover reviews suggest, particularly the one from the Chicago Tribune that sums the story as an example of cultural change that left inflexible, insular companies teetering. To quote Baum, "The characteristics that differentiated Coors from Anheuser-Busch -- that made them all so proud to be a part of Coors -- were small-scale attention to quality, identification with the West, and disdain for the hollow showmanship of advertising. All that was slipping away. The Adolph Coors Company was on its way to becoming Anheuser-Busch -- if it was lucky. If it wasn't, it was on its way to disappearing."

When an outsider finally is selected to run the company, the Coors perceive a new kind of invasion, no longer one of Visigoths, but one by the Frito Banditos. The beer going national and becoming yet another well-marketed and advertised commodity, Coors mutates into a changeling -- created by Wharton MBAs and (m)ad-men who transform the profit line and keep the company in business, However, with its eccentricities sacrificed to Mammon. It is the equivalent of niching Duncan Hines from Pillsbury cake frosting. It is no longer, "if I brew it they will come," but "tell me what you want to buy and I'll pretend what I make is what you think you need."

Avoiding the similarly undifferentiated, mass-produced, mass-consumed interstate highway system, I drove old Route 93 instead of I25 and I70 from suburbs south of Denver to Boulder several times last spring. The scenery is spectacular, the road hugging the front line. The sign to Golden is unobtrusive, and from 93, there is no vista of a near-by big industry; however, neither are there signs of a rushing pristine mountain creek feeding the bottling line. I never turned off; not being a big beer drinker, friends say that if Coors made wine, I would have. The place evokes a rugged self-sufficiency and a selective, limited interdependence among the sparse population. The newly constructed rows of condominiums are a 21st Century's intrusion which look ill-prepared to handle and thrive in the rigors of the geography and climate.

Reading Citizen Coors continues themes found in two other of our states: Meet You in Hell about Carnegie as a titan of 19th Century industry in Pennsylvania, and American Lightning about labor-management tensions in Los Angeles in more recent decades. The Coors are portrayed as austere fundamentalists, unlike the gilded age exhibitionism and self-promoting largesse of Carnegie and Frick; they are baffled yet uncompromising by workforce agitation and consumer manipulation. Their ultimate concessions come across as having been demanded as extortion and not as parity.

Tracing a family and its livelihood across generations in one location is almost as interesting in Colorado as in TC Boyle's Worlds End rendering of interconnected families in the Hudson Valley. What's missing is a sense of what Golden and Colorado were like before they was marked by the Coors. Published in 2000, it does not reference the pendulum swing to micro-breweries and also predates the locavore cause celebre. Maybe the genetic predispositions of Adolph the first have skipped a couple of generations and can flourish anew.

Sanitizing the Dirty Thirties -- Little Heathens, Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

Coming on the heels of The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl in the 30's in Oklahoma, I thought this book would parlay an analysis of the decade in a near-by State. Instead this is a nostalgic white wash by a little old lady, Mildred Armstrong Kalish, who never once mentions threatening weather or lack of money for food. Here's is a simple life, of shoeless days in meadows, cuddly farm animals, passels of cousins, and fortuitous inspiration and education.

Maybe if I were a mid-Westerner, I would prefer this book to Noel Perrin's essays on Vermont. But it covers lots of the same topics of farm life albeit from a child's perspective not a middle aged man who consciously chose that place rather than being born there.

There is nothing that is essentially Iowan about the book either. Picture look like Bennington, Vermont buildings. Recipes and folklore are universally American. It is a charming book as a piece of family history that warrants a private publication and a sharing with distant relatives. That's all.

Place as Fount of Political Philosophy -- Kentucky

Perhaps of all the titles selected for the fifty State tour, Belonging -- A Culture of Place sounded like it would be the most apropos book. Alas, I was pleased with only half of its essays; the ones that did not engage me were those that rang of polemics.

Bell Hooks, born and raised in the Kentucky hills, is at her best in the chapters dealing with black agrarian life, from the sustenance gained from raising tobacco to the solace of sewing quilts, from the scale of place determined by the distance one can walk to the sense of sisterhood fostered on a front porch. Her best stories rival those of Noel Perrin's love of the land and native flora and fauna of Vermont. Her appreciation of the need to be rooted to the land by farming it respectfully -- acknowledging the power of Nature as the leveler of man's pretense to domination -- segues well from The Worst Hard Time's theme of becoming disconnected from one's agricultural community, sinning against Nature.

However, there are other essays that read like diatribes. She is the "distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian Studies" at Berea College, a town and institution founded in 1853 to create a place of mixed races and equal classes. Hooks returns here, the prodigal daughter, seeking a place of comfort but clinging tenaciously to her terror of whites and her distrust of all the sources of power in America. Her writing style, so evocative in the stories about her grandparents and the hills and meadows, erodes to dialectic buzzwords as hegemony, patriarchy, dominator culture crop up like weeds in her otherwise cultivated reminiscences.

Large parts of these "Kentucky history made me politically what I am today" chapters contain entire paragraphs quoted from deconstructionist authors, revealing her to be yet another uber-liberal university instructor. With roots as an English major and graduate student, she advocates an entirely new language be created to permit dialogue between races. Large segments of her interview with Wendell Berry, a white Kentuckian whom she admires as a mentor for his writing about his friendship and love of black fold who lived nearly his childhood home, is merely her ranted about her perception of his motivations and her interpretations of their larger social context, with Berry replying more often than not that he had nothing of the sort in mind.

This anger seems so dissonant with the other lessons she learned in rural Kentucky and with her avowed philosophy to find contentment in a simple, earth-bound life. The interpretation of birth place as the source of religious and political groundings emerged in our books for Oregon and Nebraska, not to mention Utah. But while Hooks has some distance and wisdom that allows nature to restore her spiritually, she still fights proudly to maintain the "oppositional" habits she absorbed as a hillbilly.

Among her citations is a lengthy quote from the Different Drum by M. Scott Peck that includes: "While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the "soft" individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each other's gifts and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness other's brokenness ... and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection."

She had brought back home some inspiration from her wanderings, but she has not converted them to insight. She id defiantly settled in the blue grass.

The Farm is Gone, but the Roots Remain -- Oklahoma

This is the book about the West that I have been looking for all year: much more on the mark than Devil's Gate or Circle the Wagons or Plains Song. The Worst Hard Time is a book about the Dirty Thirties, the Dust Bowl, set primarily in the Oklahoma Panhandle, as written by Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He is writing about pioneering hardships as treacherous as those in the Utah book and about farm family tenacity as found in our selection for Nebraska. But it is Egan's writing talents that make his story sing, while the others drone on monotonously.

I also have decided that this story beats the Mormon migration because it portrays lives of people "being there" as opposed to "getting there." Comparing the two along a dimension of character motivation is interesting, except that I found it more interesting to see intent executed in daily tribulations rather than just inspiring relocation.

Egan is describing hellish lives of those homesteaders / nesters who stuck it out as long as they could during the "drouth" and dust storms and their ensuing impoverishment and killer disease. Being lured to the Panhandle, No Man's Land, the last undeveloped area in America, with promises of low cost acres, these families had a few good years, especially during World War 1 when government policies further encouraged the expansion of land devoted to the cultivation of wheat by guaranteeing high prices. Wildcat speculation ensued, further plowing under the native grass by absentee landowners. The author clearly lays the cause of the Dust Bowl to these land and farming policies, exacerbated by the lack of information and support for land-preserving farming techniques.

The magnitude and frequency of the dust storms, the nuances in the color of the dust depending on which state it was eroded from, the horrific physical symptoms of inhaling fine particulate matter for years, the sense of being held hostage by inaccessible roads and machine-stopping static electricity, the plagues of grasshoppers and jack rabbits -- the litany of curses is endless. But the only thing that does not blow away was the grit of the people.

The Slackers' search for the meaning of place in a life is herein offered another perspective. In The Worst Hard Time, place of origin is so weathered away as to be something unrecognizable ... no familiar scenery, no animals, no neighbors, no household belongings. Yet the Panhandlers remain marked by the memory of their former surroundings and their hope for its rejuvenation.

I have never been through the Panhandle, only driving up 35 straight through the middle of Oklahoma and then hanging a left on to 70, to drive interminably through the Kansas prairie. Seeing the open, grass-covered land there makes it hard for me to envision several states heading towards becoming the Great American Desert. It is difficult to associate a reclamation being needed to have it look as it does today.

As I finished The Worst Hard Time, I picked up Belonging, for Kentucky, and even after only three chapters, I am forced to think again about the over-development of land and the effect of a boom and bust, flood and drought cycle on a person's life and the values one acquires from a culture rooted in the surrounding environment. Both are nudging me to read You Can't Go Home Again and Look Homeward Angel to further explore how a place changes yet remains indelibly the same in the blood and the heart.

God Made Me Do It -- Devil's Gate

Once more, who knew ... perhaps attending private Catholic schools for the last 10 years of my education kept me from being exposed to the history and tenets of the Latter Day Saints, but, I mean, I did take comparative religions -- even if taught by a Jesuit.

Devil's Gate is subtitled "The Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy." Apparently in a mid-19th century cost cutting measure, Brigham Young decided his new recruits, coming basically from the British Isles and Scandinavia, ought to drag or push their measly 17 pounds of belongs using hand carts when traveling from Iowa to Utah instead of going in a covered wagon caravan. The tragedy entails two outings that started out too late in the year and encountered blizzards in the final days of the journey, long after the food had been rationed down to less than a half a pound of flour a day. Hundreds died; others "lost their faith" or either turned back or stayed at frontier outposts.

Like The Monster of Florence, the tragedy of the Devil's Gate was not the starvation and inclement weather, but the crime devolving from the rigidity and negligence of the elders of the Church.

The book is tedious and written in a dry, un-engaging style. If anyone is still interested, read from page 284 on, the last chapter and a half. All the revisionist versus "real" history is recapped (very redundantly) in the last 50 pages. I marked a couple of passages to quote, but now think better on it. Essentially, the author is searching to understand why the travelers put up with the suffering for the greater goodness of God's will. It is not a sympathetic description of the religion, its founders and followers, or the motivation of the principal and minor characters. It is interesting to see how deep the roots of blind adherence to religious fanatics eventfully plays out in the contemporary scandals of child abuse through forced marriages.

Nor is there a good sense of the importance of place ... unless that "place" is not Salt Lake City, but the eternal reward of heaven.

Since I have a stack of Western States books, I started The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I can reaffirm that no matter how depressing the topic, a skillful writer can make the reading fly by ... I cannot say that about Utah.

A "Vacation" Abroad

Over the past week, I unexpectedly was away from work, out of State, with time on my hands, so headed for Barnes and Noble and other airport book sellers. Two books transported me to South America and Europe, well off the beaten path of our 50 States.

Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)

Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.

I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.

Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.

An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.

I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.

Picked Up a Hitchhiker

It's been over a month since I posted any State review for the Slackers, but after I read The Women, T. C. Boyle sort of hitched a ride along my route, and like Bobbie Magee and Janis Joplin, he lured me into his storyteller world. Since he took me to three States, I am tempted to add them as better alternatives to the current picks, if everyone wants to be a Boyle junkie like me. (Coincidentally, my "face to face" book club read Water Music at my recommendation for June, but since that is about Africa, I won't go that far afield. Except to say, that Boyle's humor, erudition and style has given me my theme for the 2010 version of the Slackers: picaresque novels.)

Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.

Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.

Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.

If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.

And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.

And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.

Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.

Revisiting a Path Not Taken: Winterthur is Delaware to Me

As I read this book, I had to search my brain to recall exactly when, and more frighteningly, how I got to Winterthur. I have reconstructed my memories to be it was when I was either a junior or senior in high school, clearly before I learned to drive or had a reason for heading south. So how and why did I visit? I've decided I must have gone with my mother, by touring bus, sponsored by our town's art and historical society that her garden club was affiliated with. The museum and the gardens wiped out all recollection of traveling. It is a magical place into which you are dropped, back in time and beauty. It marked me indelibly, so much so that when I was unsuccessful when compared to my other collegemates (that is, I was not engaged and without a good prospect), I applied to the University of Delaware to pursue a Masters degree in Americana there. I got in, but I never went.

Winterthur was with me during college, though, directing my ventures off campus to the American Wing at the Met, staring for hours at huge pieces of furniture, baffled and wondering how I could ever become an expert in this arena and acutely aware that the golden ring of curatorship often depended on family wealth and class connections, other recognized personal deficit.

Henry F DuPont was an extremely shy, almost asocial child, much more interested in lilies of the valley than in the blossoming of members of the opposite sex. His distance and preoccupation with land and buildings affects his relationship with his family, Ruth Lord being his younger daughter. Her memories of her family seem as displaced as my failure to remember how I came to be in Delaware.

Here, Slackers, we have a book where not only does the principal character create his own place, but by doing so, creates his own legacy. If you love Winterthur, you cannot dislike DuPont, however aloof and isolated his life. Henry relates to his surroundings primitively: through color, scent and space; he is so conventionally awkward, never learning to spell or drive, he perhaps was dyslexic. To paraphrase Lord in her afterthoughts chapter: her father's inheritance of unlimited amount of money was coupled with his capacity to use it creatively; his innate gifts were an unparalleled visual memory, an eye for color, a remarkable sense of proportion, an untiring talent for detail; a restless drive and touch of genius that impelled him to create his masterworks.

Showing up unexpectedly in this story is the influence of Isabella Stewart Gardner (my G biography from last year) being used as the model for establishing the structure for financing the maintenance and upkeep of the museum.

I liked this quiet book, a book to be read in a park full of flowers in early spring.

Taking out "SC" -- More Gone Than You Want

Okay folks, Ella Minnow Pea is what is know as an lipogrammatic epistolary novel. All you English majors out there recall Pamela and Clarissa and probably hoped you would never have to open another volume with such a dated, forced style of writing. Developing a plot through letters, with only one-way dialogue, was a short lived, immature genre, becoming the subject of parody almost as soon as it became popular.

Playwright Mark Dunn, in this his first novel, has overlaid this story using the correspondence format with another layer of device, constraining his selection of words as the story advances by eliminating letter by letter until he is forced to write phonetically and in strained synonyms, with no ability to easily move across time by varying verb tenses.

Okay, none of the Slackers is now interested in reading this book; besides there is absolutely nothing about South Carolina in it, except that it is set on a fictional, independent island off the coast of Charleston. But it does strangely seem relevant as the world begins tweeting and dropping letters left and right. It also makes me remember all those horrible exercises Mercy Groupie had to do for her writers' class. I thought about writing this in Dunn's style, Dear Slackers, but if you carefully read through this review, you will find that the first three lost letters appear nowhere in this review. (Had to reread it and use a couple of synonyms myself.)

Place: Where You Can Be Yourself versus Where You Go to Grow -- Crazy Horse and Custer

Like several of the books in our tour of the States, Stephen Ambrose uses the device of parallel lives to trace the eventual encounter of Crazy Horse and George Armstrong Custer. A blurb on the back cover summarizes Ambrose's differentiation of the two characters: "Custer was never satisfied with where he was. He always aimed to go on to the next higher station in his society. He was always in a state of becoming. Crazy Horse accepted the situation he found himself in and aimed only to be a brave warrior ... He was in a state of being ..." Ambrose uses these men to personify the predominant traits of their people and time, and the inevitable misunderstanding and clash of cultures.

For most of the book, I ran with that premise, until I noticed the word "where" ... our quest to discover the influence of place on personality and story. Both men moved almost perpetually, and the book is hardly limited to Montana. Custer made his moves as career moves, seeing the Plains as his next theater in which to become a national star and potential Presidential candidate. He used his hometown roots to enhance his standing by marrying the most sought after girl in town. He used West Point as yet another credential, and parlayed those connections for plum assignments during and after the Civil War. His usage was almost abusive, pushing social barriers and academic and military discipline. His movement blasted through perceived confinements and rules.

Crazy Horse knew no State boundaries, only the geography of camp sites and the length his horse could travel. He did not manipulate his place/tribe and compatriots. His motivation was the advancement of his people not personal aggrandizement. His travels were often escapes into solitude and reflection.

And so, Ambrose paints two cultures which could not understand or tolerate each other's values, heritage or sense of the future.

Less explicitly, Ambrose uses the transcontinental railroad as a deus ex machina, the real cause of the Army establishing forts and squashing Indian buffalo hunts and free migration across the Plains. The railroad becomes the metaphor for "becoming" ... becoming an industrial power, an avenue for personal reconstruction and profit. It is also the weapon that decimates the herds and hunting grounds, essentially cutting off the Sioux' main trait.

I found the book slow going and scholasti and it does not present a picture of Montana in its geographical uniqueness. Rather it emphasizes two different plot lines common to all character development and good writing: the tragedy of accepting a doomed place and lot and the hubris of marking your ground to write history.

In Vino Non Veritas: The Billionaire's Vinegar

If this is our blog trip to Virginia, we are sorely DWI.

Wallace's book chronicles a twenty-plus year scam of auctioning bogus bottles of rare wine, the only connection with Virginia being that several of them were purported to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson before he left Paris for Monticello at the beginning of the French Revolution. The suspect wine adulterater is Hardy Rodenstock, nee Meinhard Gorke, who from the 1980's through just two years ago when a default judgment was rendered against him in a case brought by Bill Koch for fraud, led a high life of a French chateau and vintage snob.

Although there are brief historical references to Jefferson and the Monticello Foundation, the book is basically set in Germany and England, where Rodenstock throws his over the top wine tastings and where Christie's auction house is complicit in the sale of old bottles sorely lacking provenance.

I found the story very reminiscent of charlatan John Brinkley The last few paragraphs of the story emphasize the willing suspension of belief when someone wants something bad enough: "As with all successful cons, the marks and the grifter had been collaborators. One sold the illusion that the others were desperate to buy." With wine rather than goat gonads, the commodity seems so much more tempting. But the bidders are not buying something to drink, not even making an investment ... they are buying an image, paying outrageous dues to enter into a most select club, where their names become as famous as the vineyard that produces the coveted nectar.

In another sense, the book was like a longer version of Wine Spectator magazine, dispensing insights and nuances into viniculture. I will never taste the Bordeaux that is written about; in fact, I am probably a drinker of plonk. But the book does seduce you to blow your allowance on a bottle of Chateaux d'Yquem if only to see if Rodenstock's description of it is honest or just another part of his salesmanship: "... in a bottle of d'Yquem, the entire act of making love occurs, lust for life and depravity, melancholy and lightheartedness, poison and antidote."

Satisfying another one of my penchants, Vinegar contained six degrees of separation surprises: with Bill Buckley showing up endorsing a particular connoisseur and the Ten Broeck Mansion appearing as a source of an old cellar full of prime collectible vintages.

If Vinegar is a pit stop on our blog road trip, and we ended up in the French wine aisle of the store rather than the one showcasing scuppernong, we had a chance to drink heartily and think on Jefferson as one of the first to tip America's preference from beer to wine.

Titans Rout Steelers, Second Time in Three Years, But Practice Scrimmage Leaves Titan Offense Injured

The late 19th century was not a good time to live and work in Pittsburgh. If you worked for Carnegie Steel, you were paid a pittance and the dangers on your job were literally playing with white-hot, molten, hellish fire. Unless you were Andrew Carnegie or his partner Henry Clay Frick.

In Meet You in Hell, Les Standiford has recreated the rise to wealth of these two titans of the steel industry, showing their business acumen and their lavish lifestyle and philanthropy starkly against the meager existence of their laborers.

Here is another story that illustrates that it is not just place, but more importantly time, that indelibly marks the main characters, providing an alignment of fate and opportunity. Their lives coincided with the rise of Industrialism. They were fortuitous to live in a region of the country, recovering from the Civil War, where raw materials, river and rail transportation, and burgeoning ranks of East European immigrants came together to make Pittsburgh the engine of growth.

Both were essentially self-taught and self-made men, the remnant of the Puritan hard work ethic with its corollary of entitlement to relish its rewards. While both espoused a philosophy of rags to riches achievement, neither created a climate to encourage or mentor others. To them, it was survival of the fittest and the weaker be exploited.

This theme is expressed through three events: first, the Johnstown flood of 1889. I never realized this flood was anything other than a natural disaster. Standiford clearly outlined the contribution of a private hunting club used by both Carnegie and Frick and other elites and their lack of maintenance and upkeep on the dam holding back an aged reservoir. None of these owners were ever found liable. The second, the strike in 1892 at the Homestead mill predated the worst of America's labor unrest. Both Carnegie and Frick intended to burst the union, and succeeded after a lock-out of almost 150 days, during which both armed Pinkerton guards and the Pennsylvania State militia were called in to intervene. The last incident is when Carnegie turned on Frick to force him out of Carnegie Steel and Frick Coke, its subsidiary supplier of fuel for the furnaces. The titans of industry lost only when they attacked each other. But the payout for selling the company to J. P. Morgan to create U. S. Steel out of the ashes of this fiery feud gave them both phoenix-like reincarnations as benefactors of culture, art and higher education.

I got more of a sense of time from Meet You in Hell than a feeling for Western Pennsylvania. I sensed more clearly the journey through the fifty states is time travel as well as a trip over blue highways. The book did not attempt to show the monstrosity of the mills, their effects on the environment or health of the population. It did not portray scenery or community other than as an extension of the furnace -- as a place to recoup briefly before returning for another twelve hour shift. Missing is the alchemy of making a life instead of a legacy, aspiring to an eternal flame. The only fires left around Pittsburgh are not producing steel but are the inextinguishable consumption of abandoned coal mines below the decimated small surrounding towns.

Archeology: Digging Underneath Ohio Cities

Now that I've finished reading the collection of vignettes that is Winesburg, Ohio, I can better see its faint connection to Knockemstiff. And it is a connection of place.

Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg in 1919, and he finds his personal expression in the character George Willard, the man-child newspaper reporter in a village so small it could fit on a mantel as Christmas decorations.

Three things struck me, literary-wise, in the small volume I read that was issued in 1958 as part of the Viking Portable Library series. First, a book that offers a map of the area in which the story takes place does the reader's imagination a disservice. When the face-to-face book club read Song Yet Sung this winter, several members thought the story would have been easier to follow if the author had included a map. At the time, I thought so as well. Thinking back now, the undeveloped primitive flood plains of the Maryland shore convey as sense of fluidity and danger that echoes the flux of the society in which the characters struggle. In the case of Winesburg, the place comes across small and rigid when the characters walk the grid of the town and all townsfolk have an assigned task without duplication: one grocer, druggist, doctor, banker, minister. Winesburg is self-contained and comfortable with a daily rhythm of the train schedule and a yearly cycle wholly agarian. The map states the obvious: you can't get lost in Winesburg as long as you know where you belong in it.

Second, a bad introduction is worse than a bad review. Here someone named Malcolm Cowley writes as though he is conducting a comparative literature lecture in mid-American novels. He points out all of Anderson's flaws, from shifts in verb tenses, to personality quirks ending in the breakup of friendships and mentoring advice with several contemporary authors. (It would be like an introduction to the Wright stories emphasizing how below code the wiring and heating systems were.) He faults Anderson's writing as lacking structure and development, saying his stories are set in the moment, like "a flash of lightning that revealed a life without changing it." But then goes on to say this is exactly what works for Winesburg, redeeming itself with the incorporation of the reflective three final chapters.

Finally, Anderson himself introduced the stories with a chapter called "the Book of the Grotesque." (Little could he imagine the scary people in Knockemstiff.) Nevertheless, he protests too much. The townsfolk are not dangerous, deformed, spiteful or in trouble with the law. Their fantasies and motives, when disclosed, are the stuff of human foibles not deviant mental health or perversions. If Anderson recalls the people from his hometown (Clyde, Ohio) as specters in his dreams, they are ghostly, not fleshed out fully, and silent.

And so, Winesburg itself is a phantom, another ghost town, not caused by chronic rust-belt unemployment like Knockemstiff with its citizen-zombies zonked out of their mind with illegal drugs, but simply by the passage of time and the inevitable need of a new American generation to transplant itself when it has become root-bound. The book is nostalgic, a perfect discourse by someone who still wonders was it is upbringing that made him the way he grew up to be.

Just a Better Story Teller -- Wisconsin Take Two

The Women is T. C. Boyle's latest novel and it is a variation on the story that the Slackers selected for Wisconsin, Loving Frank, about Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Cheney, for whom he built Taliesin. That novel, as my review of May 4 noted, is more a delving into the motivation, anxiety and self-articulation of Mamah than it is a portrait of an architect and his influence on what parts of America came to look like and value.

Boyle's rendition is more dimensionalized. Kitty, the first wife, and Anna, his mother, are portrayed similarly as in Horan's book. New perspectives are introduced that emphasize other angles of Wright's personality: Miriam, the poseur and morphine addict, who seduced him with solace after Mamah's death, and Olga, his last wife, who finally makes his house more of a home.

After reading the second novel, Wright's architectural style became clearer to me, yet more symbolic, representing an articulation of his personal traits and needs. He wanted to create comfort, a retreat -- but he wanted to work there as well. He wanted light to stream in through windows without shades -- but he wanted no outsider to look inside. He wanted buildings to grow out of the earth organically -- but he also wanted them to float, unbounded.

It is this last tension that lends itself to a comparison with Wright's moral and ethical decisions. He has to be free to attract adoring women who are ornamental; however, he not only introduces them as his household staff, but actually expects they will cook for his construction crews and apprentices. He manages to dress his women in his own designs, given any occasion, and decorate them and each room of Taliesin to his exacting taste; yet, he leaves them with the responsibility and embarrassent of having to deal with mountains of unpaid bills for such ornaments and luxuries. He continues his extramarital affairs, publically flaunting community values, only to repeatedly become a fugitive until he and his current lover are found yet again by the press or angry spouses.

Boyle employs more literay devices to make the story captivating. Using a Japanese apprentice as the narrator allows both Frank and his women to be examined at more arm's lenght, whereas the Horan novel is more simpatico to Mamah. Oddly enough, it is Boyle's persona of Tadashi as Wright's contemporary that makes the novel read less romantically, less nostalgically. The interpretive footnotes not only help to cross reference the flashback plot, but also permit Boyle himself to intrude at his comic and erudite best.

Because Boyle involves more characters in the novel, its themes of heritage vs. alienation, of homeland vs. the allure of the foreign, of image vs practicality, of the nagging daily details of life vs personal destiny, and of the quest for fame vs. its manipulated publicity, are more evident as they find expression from every quarter, in all characters.

The Women closes out my trip to Wisconsin, but Boyle himself detours me to The Road to Wellville to Battlecreek, Michigan and cornflake king Kellogg and from there back to California, to the Riven Rock estate near Montecito, to meet the son of Cyrus McCormick, he of reaper fame.