The Flatness and Other Landscapes (review)

Reviews Full-Length Reviews The Flatness and Other Landscapes by Michael Martone The University of Georgia Press, 1999 171 pages, cloth, $24.95 In this coUection offourteen essays, which won the 1999 AssociatedWriting Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, Michael Martone explores the Midwest: the place, its people, its mythology. This place between the coasts is for many people simply a "flyover," as Martone entitles one of his essays. It is a place the culture teUs us it is good to be from, but not necessarily of. It is a place the popular imagination sees as vast, monotonous fields, a landscapeW H. Auden could not describe with the same joie de vivre as mountains , woods, or islands, "I cannot see a plain without a shudder:/0 God, please, please don't ever make me live there!'" Martone's vision is more generous , loving, and complex. The very concept ofbeing Midwestern is part ofthat complexity. Martone defines the states that comprise the flyover as ". . . Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, IUinois, and Iowa. . . . My students in Iowa always excluded Ohio and Michigan from their maps of the Midwest as eastern states. Growing up in Indiana, I would never include Missouri, too southern, or Kansas, too western, in my cognitive setup." What ties these various cognitive maps together for the people who Uve there is a common experience of place, a sense that these are places that can be completely understood only by long association: "This landscape can never take us emotionally in the way smoky crags or crawUng oceans can. We stare back at it. Beneath our skins, we begin to disassemble the mechanisms of how we feel. We begin to feel," Martone writes in his essay, "The Flatness." 244 Contributors245 Martone's Midwest is both subde and grand. The author grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is also the home town ofEdith Hamilton, whose popular book Mythology was the first introduction many ofus had to Greek myth. Hamilton's presence is felt in many ofthese essays, as Martone defines his own mythic view. "Mythology, and I keep thinking of a biological/mechanical metaphor, seeks to attach a cultural memory into our experiential wiring," Martone muses in "Stories We TeU Ourselves." Because his father worked for the telephone company and he has memory of the old mechanical switches predating our high tech optic fibers, one of Martone's "mechanical metaphors" is that of a network of wires strung across the landscape, Unking it aU together. More importandy it is the stories that sometimes hum across those wires that create the myths ofthis place. This linkage is not always such a positive force. Two ofmy favorite essays in The Flatness and Other Landscapes chronicle the impact of forces reaching beyond local borders. In "PuUing Things Back Down to Earth," Martone spends a weekend with Tom, a former student, now working on the family hog farm. Farms are no longer self-contained—they are part of a complex web of commodity markets and multinational corporations: "[Tom] is an employee of the large companies that seU him equipment, chemicals, seeds, and the sperm that he depends upon, that give him bright jackets and caps, his uniforms. He is aware ofthis. There is irony on the farm." Another irony is that many ofthe same economic trends that make Tom's farm a volatile locus of forces has drained energy from inner cities. Martone returns to FortWayne as an adult, renting an apartment in a downtown hotel to work on a novel (never completed) about the city. He points out in "Living Downtown," that the year he was born "saw the signing ofthe Defense Highway Act and the opening of the first McDonald's and Disneyland." And whüe the city resurrects a stories-high lighted Santa Claus and encourages carriage rides downtown, it's hard to escape feeUng that, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein's famous quip about another Midwestern city that there's no longer any there there. The real strength, however, of The Flatness and Other Landscapes is in the way Martone personalizes these forces, how he makes the reader understand the affection and amazement he feels for...