The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt - Softcover

Athitakis, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997774282 ISBN 13: 9780997774283

Verlag: BELT PUB, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has been reflected or ignored by novelists and short story writers. From Marilynne Robinson to Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison to Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell to Stewart O’Nan this book is a call to rethink the way we conceive Midwestern fiction, and one that is sure to prompt some new must-have additions to every reading list.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Athitakis serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and writes the Reading the Midwest column for Belt Magazine. He has been published in Barnes and Noble Review, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, and many other outlets. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

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The New Midwest

A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt

By Mark Athitakis

Belt Publishing

Copyright © 2016 Mark Athitakis
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9977742-8-3

Contents

Introduction, 
The Latest Migrants, 
Is This Heaven?, 
Hard Work and Other Lies of the Heartland, 
Keep the Midwest Weird, 
Somehow Form a Family, 
Childhood's End, 
Bad Places, 
The Great American/Midwestern Novel, 
"What About ...?", 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

THE LATEST MIGRANTS

"A stranger comes to town" is the oldest story in the book, and in Midwestern fiction that story has tended to play out in two ways: immigrant and pioneer stories like Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, or Great Migration stories like Native Son (1940). The fates of the characters in those novels are radically different, but at heart they're effectively assimilation novels: the prevailing question is, How do I become an American? How do you make sense of the folkways that mark the country, from work to race, and successfully navigate them? This can play out in tragedy, as in Native Son, or as a conqueror's tale, as in The Adventures of Augie March. But the underlying assumption is that there is an underlying core of American-ness worth aspiring to.

In a time when the plains at the Midwest's far western edge were ample and open for homesteading, and when the city was a manufacturing hub that could support a quick rise up the ladder (or at least magnetized people who believed it could), the message in such novels felt right and timely. But when upward mobility is in doubt, when there is no one kind of American status to assimilate into, and there is less coherence to the region, what story do we tell now? The prevailing question today is now slightly different: How do I become myself in this place?

If a single work began highlighting this question, it's Stuart Dybek's second story collection, The Coast of Chicago (1990). Dybek's gentler musings on Chopin and baseball replaced melodrama and steely prose about stockyards and empire builders. His sensibility was at once streetwise and omniscient, hyperaware of the forces that were affecting his imagined lower- and middle-class residents, mostly Poles, and also filled with highly individualized portraits of characters who represented a newly pluralistic city. His characters weren't broad symbols for what it meant to fit in; they were people challenging the idea of fitting in in the first place.

The collection's signature story, "Blight," is narrated by one of those Poles, a young man recalling the moment when his neighborhood, Pilsen, was deemed an "Official Blight Area" by the mayor. For a person with few interests beyond the White Sox and comic books, and who sees then-mayor Richard J. Daley as a distant, kingly figure, the idea of his turf having an official status — and a low-class one at that — is at once revelatory and baffling to him and his friends:

"How can a place with such good viaducts have blight, man?" Pepper asked ...

"Frankly, man," Ziggy said, I always suspected it was a little fucked up around here."

"Well, that's different," Pepper said. "Then let them call it an Official Fucked-Up Neighborhood."

It's a joke, but Dybek makes it clear something serious has changed: the boys have been told they're now outsiders twice over, ethnically and civically. It's as if the maps in their textbooks have been replaced with something new, in unfamiliar shapes. They're forced to learn a new language — the story turns on multiple attempts to define "blight" — and their wisdom no longer arrives solely through an immediate social circle of family, church, school, and friends. Now, they're reckoning with being a function of the dictates of Da Mare.

The boys catch a sense of just how much they've been "placed" when they visit the tonier Oak Street Beach: after taking in "the white-sailed yachts" and "the lake-reflecting glass walls of high rises," they return home joking, "Back to blight." The term becomes at once a badge of honor and a source of resentment. The band they form starts out as the No Names but soon becomes the Blighters, because "there seemed to be some unspoken relationship between being nameless and being a loser." But the pathos of the story is the creeping knowledge that being a Blighter is being a loser, too. The choice is to embrace the term ironically or to ignore it. But agreeing with Mayor Daley's dictate is not an option.

Jeffrey Eugenides gives Dybek's vision of place and individualism a broader scale; his talent has long been to track this sense of disassociation and give it a more portentous, even epic scope. His debut novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), sketched out the demises of three attractive young girls in the Detroit suburbs in lush, ironic prose; in 2011's The Marriage Plot, he merged semiotics and Austen to follow the paths of a woman and two suitors starting from their lives as Brown University undergrads. But his greatest achievement remains his second novel, 2002's Pulitzer-winning Middlesex, which is not just a rich study of gender but a sophisticated exploration of the immigrant experience in Detroit during its mid-century industrial heyday.

Cal (born Calliope), the novel's hermaphrodite narrator who is the daughter of Greek immigrants, discovers her male aspect as a teenager. Eugenides emphasizes the tension between Cal's inbetween, uncertain status and the rigidity of Cal's surroundings — Detroit's hard-line class distinctions (especially between lower-class Greeks and upscale WASPs) and the rigors of the assembly line. There's a rhetorical tension too, upending the conventions of the bildungsroman and the Homeric ode. "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!" Cal writes in the opening pages, as if he were writing a mock-Odyssey. "How it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother's own Midwestern womb."

The point of this tension is that no identity is secure — not "Detroiter," not "manufacturing," not "boy," or "girl." Detroit is a testing ground for Cal, a place where her (and his) identity is tested, shaped, and defined. It's actually an excellent setting for having your identity called into question, Eugenides suggests. "Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913," referring to how the assembly line mechanized workers, right down to their DNA. "The adaptation has been passed down: We've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds." The mid-century Midwest can try to force you to snap into a role; Middlesex is a late-century reminder that not everybody fit.

A novelist who challenges the rules of the assimilation narrative doesn't always get appreciated for it, though. Consider the case of Aleksandar Hemon, whose biography has become a kind of Midwestern literary legend. In 1992 Hemon visited Chicago as part of a cultural exchange program with his native Bosnia, where he was a young journalist, critic, and art-scene provocateur. While in the city, he experienced a spectacular case of bad timing: war broke out in his homeland during the trip, trapping him in a large, unfamiliar place where he had few...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BELT PUB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0997774282
• ISBN 13: 9780997774283
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 104
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar