Midwestern Imagination

In Michael Martone's new anthology, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover, he attempts to assuage the notion of the Midwest as a flat, cold, boring twilight zone of crops, white-steepled churches, and the topography of your basic driveway basketball court. This engaging collection of nontraditional stories and fictions by native and current Midwesterners serves Martone's purpose well, providing an eclectic sampling of just how avant-garde—at least in terms of contemporary literature—these corn-fed, God-fearing, incline-impaired artists can be.

Martone begins the anthology with an editor's note, telling the tale of a trip he took with his wife in 1980, introducing her to Indiana—Martone's home state—and all its eccentricities. As Martone lists the various attractions his boyhood home has to offer, he is successful in setting the tone for the pages to follow, one of whimsy, wonder, and most of all, regard. While not every story in the anthology is about the Midwest or even placed there—in fact, most aren't—the sense going into each new offering is that Michael Martone himself, or Joe/Jane Big Ten, will be the story's protagonist, taking with him or her the values, the idiom, and the attitude that Martone precludes.

Take, for example, "Beginnings" by Robert Coover, one of the peaks Martone has pegged. Nowhere in his work does Coover mention the Midwest, or even hint at its more typical connotations; Coover himself is from Iowa, making him eligible here. But I couldn't help but think that a Midwesterner was informing the goings-on as I read passages such as

He once wrote a story about a man who was born at the age of thirty-two with a self-destruct mechanism in his gonads, such that he could be sure of only one orgasm before he died. This man traveled all over the world, seeking out the perfect mate for his ultimate experience, but blew it one night in a wet dream on a jet flight over Bangkok.

While this excerpt describes the imaginings of its writer protagonist, not actual goings-on, a feeling of the mild-mannered gone astray hangs over every line. The hero of the story, in an effort to be more productive, travels to a remote island, where he must shoot himself and find inspiration in his own bloodstain on the wall. It is perhaps a fitting and ironic centerpiece for Martone's goals, for the Midwesterner to escape his or her confines and celebrate the eccentricity that was always within.

In terms of the "peculiar" angle of the subtitle, some stories stray into the experimental, such as Sandy Huss's picture-inclusive "Long Walk" and Kellie Wells's columned "Secession, XX." Others approach, border, and infiltrate the absurd, including Robin Hemley's "All You Can Eat," the story of a man determining the worth of his life while at a pancake breakfast, guest-starring none other than Aunt Jemima herself. Other high points—and there are many—include Jesse Lee Kercheval's "A History of Indiana," Lily James's "Round," Josh Russell's "The Great War," and Brian McMullen's "Talking to My Old Science Teacher about Drawings in which I Killed Him," where the author writes himself into delightful transitions such as "Let's switch over to the meat cleaver drawing."

Martone also includes a bevy of familiar names, writers synonymous with the Midwest who prove themselves more than up to the task of representing their region. Stuart Dybek comes through with the excellent "Visions of Budhardin," a semi-familiar Dybek tale filled with altar boys and South Side shenanigans—paired with an animated elephant costume up to no good. Louise Erdrich's "Fuck With Kayla and You Die" tells the story of a burglar who encounters more than one life-altering twist upon breaking and entering. Scott Russell Sanders deals with the inevitability of growing old, and less limber, in "July Snow."

Perhaps the only failing of the...