U.S. Geography
State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
Ecco Press, 608 pp., $29.95
Having returned from a long berth abroad, State by State co-editor Matt Weiland found himself road-tripping the U.S., newly in love with what he calls “the essential looseness of American lives, the vitality and variety of American vistas, the cut and jib of American talk.” After powwowing with fellow editor Sean Wilsey, the two decided they wanted to produce an anthology that reflected the vast diversity of the 50 states (the project was in large part inspired by the New Deal-era Works Projects Administration American Guide Series of the Federal Writers’ Project). To that end, they drafted 50 writers, musicians, culture commentators, and even a celebrity chef (Anthony Bourdain) to write about a state each. Some of the contributors write eloquently and sometimes emotionally about a home state; others take a more journalistic approach (David Rakoff, for one, uses Around the World in 80 Days as a touchstone for his outsider-looking-in chapter on Utah). Texas, it must be said, is a disappointment; having passed a mere three years once upon a time in Dallas and taken a couple of weekend trips around the state, Cristina Henríquez seems not terribly qualified for the task at hand (although she does have very nice things to say about the Texas Book Festival). The state entries that sing are the most subjective ones, the ones that chuck any “Welcome to …!” aspirations for a more personal rendering. Joshua Ferris’ sentimental but never saccharine ode to Florida’s Cudjoe Key is a lovely memory piece on landscape and adolescence, and gentle bear Barry Hannah’s unflinching musings on Mississippi relit in me a long-buried desire to see Oxford. Which is the last thing Hannah wants: “I hesitate writing this because our town is growing too fast and slick for us geezers, who puke at almost everything new and at the robotic developments whacking down much of our greenscape.” And that, perhaps, is the biggest lesson to be learned from this admirable, illuminating book: You better get to wherever you want to go soon, because whatever made it mythic is going fast, if not gone already. Ain’t that America?
Additional Reading: Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future by Greg Melville (Algonquin Books, 257 pp., $15.95, paper); Zane Grey: Western Legends by Zane Grey (Forge Books, 784 pp., $19.95); Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon (Little, Brown and Co., 592 pp., $27.99)
This article appears in December 12 • 2008.
