Being from the Midwest and having subsequently lived all over the world, I never quite know how people will respond when I tell them where I’m from. “Oh, it gets hot there, doesn’t it?” Or cold. Tornadoes usually come up. (I’ve seen three with my own eyes.) And when the topic of weather is exhausted, there are the usual cliches about flatness, boredom, provincialism, and humility nearly always echoing each other. Mostly, though, people just shrug. And I shrug along with them. The Midwest is a cipher you can project almost anything you want onto. Its geographical borders are amorphous and difficult to define. And conceptually, it has the fuzziest of identities, constantly shifting and supremely difficult to get a purchase on. My native land leaves me tongue-tied.
The writer Phil Christman takes this baffling vagueness as his point of departure in the wonderfully rich Midwest Futures, published by Belt Publishing. Toward the beginning of the book, mulling over the name of the region itself, Christman writes:
The Portuguese have saudade, a melancholy sense of longing. The Turks have huzun, a feeling of nostalgia so acute that it induces torpor. Surely, the Midwest deserves a word all its own to describe its vast hunger for a settled, temporal home. A word to describe both the plaintive longing you hear in the trumpet of Miles Davis (from East St. Louis) and the heavy silences punctuating Hemingway’s (from Oak Park, Illinois) prose.
But perhaps this sensibility isn’t enough to connect one Midwestern artist to another. What do William Burroughs, Iggy Pop, Prince, Madonna, T.S. Eliot, Charlie Parker, and Marianne Moore have in common other than region of origin? If there’s anything definitive to be said about them, Christman explains, it’s that they’re each unique. “Midwestern creativity,” he writes, “feeds on anonymity, on secrecy. It seam-rips at normality until it finds strangeness. We see Midwestern artists, then, as singular, not regional.” Midwestern artists want to be left alone to cultivate idiosyncratic inner worlds. The lack of a regional style or aesthetic is a feature, not a bug. To drive the point home, Christman mentions that infamous interaction between Matt Damon and Prince when Damon said to the musician, “I hear you live in Minnesota,” to which Prince responded, “I live inside my own heart, Matt Damon.”
It’s difficult not to see this self-creation as mirroring the intentional and inorganic creation of the Midwest itself. Midwest Futures begins with the Beginning Point of the U.S. Public Lands Survey in East Liverpool, Ohio, a monument roughly marking the spot where, on Aug. 20, 1785, “a member of the team tasked by the governments of Virginia and Pennsylvania with finding, or naming, or inventing, the invisible lines that demarcate these states from each other … initiated the mapping of another series of boundaries: between the vast territory to the west and the thirteen states that it might enrich.”
“Enrich” is the correct word. From the very beginning, Christman tells us, even as the Midwest was being arbitrarily blocked off into townships of 6 square miles, which were themselves organized into large grids of 36-square-mile boxes, the region was seen as “not a place [but] a fund. Big Eastern land speculators already eyed these plots.” Novel ways of making money, from the development of speculation in futures to the almost perennially unprofitable railroads, became part of the region’s legacy. These money-grabbing schemes, foisted on a usually skeptical public through dizzying technological prowess or sheer political force, had obvious social effects that reverberated through the entire culture. “Ford and Fordism,” Christman writes, referring to the system of assembly-line factory construction pioneered by Henry Ford in Detroit, “can be seen as little more than the mass production of averageness: a standard workday, a standard wage, a car that comes in any color as long as it’s black.”
This is a fantastic book by one of the most underappreciated writers of my generation on a topic that isn’t easy to write about. It’s such a joy that I zipped through it in a single day. Its weakest points (heavily diluted by its charming prose) come when Christman offers us a few knee-jerk political observations. When he goes on about citizens being guilted into thanking “veterans, and them alone, for the supposed ease of American life,” we roll our eyes. Sticking it to military patriotism in 2020 feels empty, if not hackneyed. But much like the weather in the Midwest, if you don’t like the sentiment you’re currently reading, just wait a couple of minutes. The book will reward you.
William Gass, another Midwestern artist, wrote in his novel In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: “This Midwest, a dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time, as Alice both changed and remained in her story.” The Midwest continues to change, but it maintains an eerie atmosphere of existing in a permanent present — the past gone, the future always just over the horizon. In this sense, it really is America writ small. Stare into it deeply enough, and you’ll see your own image clarify.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
