The Flatness and Other Landscapes
by Michael Martone
University of Georgia Press, 171 pp., $24.95
Michael Martone explores what he likes to call the “Midwestern paradox” in The Flatness and Other Landscapes, which has won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. “My isolation on one of the margins of the world,” he says, is also “my connection to what is essential in the scheme of all things.” As others have exalted America’s mountains and coasts, so Martone strives to pen a love song to his beloved, if flat, home. Too many, he says, drive through the Midwest, or fly over it, and never stop to listen to the music of its cities or to smell the dirt of its fertile farms. The Midwest, Martone says, is “the gut of the nation.” And though it may not always be picturesque, thrilling, or easy to understand, it is essential to all that we deem American.
“I think you should visit some of the hidden places of the country, farms and factories. Schools and offices,” Martone writes. “Get authorization to be admitted, become the author of what you witness.” Taking his own advice, Martone visits Riverside, Iowa, a town planning to become the birthplace of the fictional Captain Kirk, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he walks “among ruins that are hard to see.”
“The true regions of the world we live in are mapped by the stories we tell,” Martone writes. He marks the Midwest with tales like thumbtacks, and in doing so not only calls attention to places that are “hidden in plain sight,” but challenges his readers to think about the spaces between mappings, and the glittering stories waiting to be unearthed there.
This article appears in March 31 • 2000.