Synopsis
Seen from the air, the seemingly endless "flyover" spaces that form America's Midwest appear in rectangular variations of brown, green, and ochre, with what Michael Martone terms "the tended look of a train set." In these essays, the flatness of the region becomes the author's canvas for a richly textured, multidimensional exploration of its culture and history. In the tradition of the Greek myths that inspire him, Martone begins at the beginning--his beginning--as a child who "grew up" in his mother's high school English classroom. As the essays unfold, provocative accounts of his experiences lead us on a path toward discovery of the stories that build our own sense of place and color our understanding of the world.
From depicting the details of mechanized cow-milking to relating the similarities between the Greek city of Sparta and Indianapolis, Martone subtly connects different cultures, times, and stories. "Stories We Tell Ourselves" characterizes the fluid, energetic writing that transforms a mundane small town into an intertwined, vibrant world shaped by the perceptions and memories of the people who live there. What begins in one classroom at Central High effortlessly builds into a discussion, by turns playful, serious, and poignant, that touches on myriad subjects. Before our eyes, Martone unites The Odyssey, Iowa farmers, a human genome map, American Gothic, and Dan Quayle into a saga equal to any from Classical mythology, showing us that a house, a farm, a town, a country, or a civilization has energy and dimension only through the stories of its inhabitants. The Flatness and Other Landscapes proves that our lives and the landscapes that surround us are only as flat as we perceive them to be.
Reviews
Here is an ode to the farming life that is most eloquent when it is most down-to-earth. These essays (previously published in small magazines and anthologies) reflect on the inner and outer territories of the Midwest. What keeps the reader's interest alive is Martone's keen eye for the uncanny details of ordinary life in an agricultural community. His depiction of how the system of vacuum pipes acts in an automatic milking machine (the pipe "runs around the barn, circles over the stalls like a halo"), his description of the process in which pigs' needle teeth and tail are snipped (so they don't bite each others' tails off when they're crowded into a pen), his account of "walking the beans" (weeding the rows of crop beans by walking up and down with a special hoe topped with a wick dipped in an extremely potent herbicide)--all these draw the reader into a world that seems simultaneously familiar and utterly alien. Where Martone (Seeing Eye) falters in passages in which he tries to muse upon the inner lives of ordinary Midwesterners. His attempt, while teaching a course on rural and agricultural literature, to locate the grandeur of agricultural life by linking the Iowa farmer with Odysseus on his return from the Trojan war rings false, and his comparison of Indianapolis to the ancient city of Sparta is equally forced. Most off-putting are the self-conscious passages in which Martone reflects upon his own reflections upon storytelling; here he devolves into a tangential meta-narrative that utterly undoes the spell cast by his more concrete and insightful real-life descriptions. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Martone, author of essays (Townships, 1992) and short fiction (Seeing Eye, 1995) steeped in the mythology of the Midwest, offers more essays on the same subject in this 1999 Associated Writing Programs creative nonfiction winner. ``I think you should visit some of the hidden places of the country, farms and factories,'' Martone says in a long essay devoted to an Iowa farm. Modern farming is so little reported upon that his subtle, intelligent musings can be startling. He finds a sad poetry even in confinement hog operations: the difficult working conditions for humans, not unlike that of coal miners two generations ago; the strange, not quite porcine, smells, as if one were in a laboratory; and the insistence on acting alive that pigs sometimes exhibit even when they might seem to be no more than machines. Martone sounds like Thoreau when he meditates on windmills, speculating that they are, on a flat landscape, as much symbol as physical object, that they have transubstantiated into our collective myth of the farm. True, he flounders when he tours Greece, trying to find similarities to his native Indiana, and he will lose some readers in his essay on teaching English, charming as it is. But at his best Martone has a knack for finding meaning in the mundane, in the very flatness of Midwestern landscapes, as in his account of an attempt to revive the dying town of Riverside, Iowa, by declaring it to be the birthplace of James T. Kirk, Captain of the Starship Enterprise, and its contrasting sister city, Kalona, an Amish farming town and perversely prosperous bastion of the past. Uneven, inconclusive, but at the same time original, probing, provocative. Someone should send Martone on a long sabbatical to write the Great Midwestern Novel. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This slim volume, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, envelopes the reader in the "flat" geography of the Midwest. As Martone, a native of Indiana who often writes of his home state, says, "It is flat for the people who drive through, but those who live here begin to sense a slight unevenness." In this book, he writes about everyday towns, filled with everyday people. He describes the landscape with such passion that his essays become like word-paintings, and its inhabitants seem like characters in a film. Martone's autobiographical style works as a welcoming entry into the life of the American heartland. He employs popular culture, literature, and classical mythology, educating us along the way about the planting season, windmills, and mechanized cow-milking. This delightful train ride across the Midwest is highly recommended for all libraries.
-Cynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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