Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape (review)

Book Reviews211 If there is one drawback to this story, it is that the personal insights— though appeaUng—are not entirely fresh. One wishes that such a daring technique could have been coupled with more original perceptions and literary voice. Despite this concern, the text remains a pleasurable read. Prairie Son wiU be appealing to older adult readers, Midwest history buffs, and readers of general nonfiction. It wül be an especially touching read for anyone who has been part of an adoption. Reviewed by Anne-Marie Oomen Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape by Lisa Knopp University of Iowa Press, 1998 286 pages, paper, $22.95 "Sometimes I wish that I could make a few revisions in my childhood— modify a few traits in myselfor others, add or smooth out twists in the plot. But mostly I feel nothing but gratitude for the sheer good fortune ofbeing born into such a place, at such a time, and among such people."These lines are from "Local Traffic," Lisa Knopp's portrait of the neighborhood where she Uved as a child in Burlington, a smaU city in southeastern Iowa, perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River. They express the tendency toward acceptance, with some mild reservations, which characterizes her approach to most of the moments she shares in the essays and chapters of this book. In the early sections Knopp captures and revives the world of her childhood by bringing a child's perspective to sharply focused experience. In "Outside" she teUs how, waiting for the bus each week after dance lessons, she longs for the submarines at Kresge's lunch counter, an important lesson about the essence ofunfulfiUed desire. In "Not Catholic" she compares her Methodist upbringing with the imagined life ofher CathoUc neighbors and ponders her attraction to Catholicism. In the title essay, remembering a childhood longing to fly and a passion for birds, she recognizes that her flight dreams were emblematic ofher longing to escape. In other essays she relives visits to family plots in a local cemetery, an August afternoon with her grandmother,jobs in a florist shop, a restaurant, and a bar. Later sections focus on adulthood; she records her involvement with the Transcendental Meditation movement, her decision to accept single parenthood, her turbulent marriage to a Trinidadian and their subsequent divorce. 212Fourth Genre In the final sections she explores the influences that led her to become a nature essayist. The "flight dreams" theme, which has been threaded Ughtly through several essays, emerges powerfuUy in the last essays, which offer echoes ofher fine earlier coUection, Field ofVision, and bring her soUdly to the present. In "Omen Catcher," she writes ofsitting in a clearing Ustening to a scarlet tanager and observing its flight overhead: "This sign bodes weU for me. It assures me that I have positioned myselfwhere I need to be." It seems that she is writing not only ofher location in the clearing but also of her location in the world. It's a hopeful ending. I have been dancing around the question of what to caU the sections of this book. The autobiographical impulse at its core (it's a volume in Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography) isn't acted upon in a very consistent or unified way. For the reminiscent essays in the first half ofthe book, this is less problematic than in the closing sections. The sections on chüdhood and adolescent experience are engrossing evocations of time and place that work perfectly weU as freestanding, independent essays.Yet at some point in the book the sections begin to function less as essays and more like chapters in a chronology. They become more expository than narrative . The earUer impulse to recreate experience gives way to an impulse to recount personal history. In a sense the book begins to metamorphose from memoir in linked essays into autobiography in successive chapters. The problem, for me at least, is that as a reader of related essays I don't expect the essayist to connect the essays more tightly or bridge the gaps among them more fully. But as a reader of autobiography foUowing a chronology of the...