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.