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  • The Melon Capital of the World: A Memoir by Blake Allmendinger
  • Linda K. Karell
Blake Allmendinger, The Melon Capital of the World: A Memoir. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. 152pp. Cloth, $21.95.

When teaching memoir, I remind my students that it must achieve more than a rendering of “and then this happened, and then that, and then this other thing.” Since reading Blake Allmendinger’s memoir, The Melon Capital of the World, I’m still wondering if that reminder, or the old saw “show, don’t tell,” might have saved a promising story. In any case, Allmendinger’s memoir is blessedly brief but still a frustrating slog for this reader. Allmendinger, a western literature scholar, returns to his childhood home of Rocky Ford, Colorado, during the summer of 2009 in search of some understanding of his manic-depressive mother and the abuse she heaped on his childhood, his parents’ subsequent divorce, and the memories his home triggers for him. The outlines of most lives have the potential [End Page 272] to shatter and redistribute one’s understanding. Interviewing residents, noting the isolation that attends outsiders (anyone not straight and white), growing up in this rural not-garden-of-Eden, glancingly tracing his family’s and townspeople’s histories, and eventually confronting his mother’s death and his reunion with his father, Allmendinger neither shatters nor redistributes.

For general readers who pursue the memoir boom hoping to see challenges to the form or execution of language, or for western literature fans hoping for new or revitalized theorizings of the West, there is only disappointment here. Allmendinger does not merely skirt the hard questions contemporary memoir takes up, he seems unaware of them. He burdens his audience with precise information about his allergies and trips to the grocery store, his outing to the annual fair, and a reunion with a former teacher, but includes only empty proclamations of the emotional drama he purports to explore: “I never went hungry as a child. But I had an emptiness my mother was unable to fill” (39); “people sometimes hurt the ones they loved” (96); “I had to create my own family by surrounding myself with people who loved me for who I was” (101); and “laughing was a way to cope with the pain” (110). The gift of literature and the magnificence of good memoir, that most generous of all genres in its personal risk and revelation, is that it makes the obviousness of cliché into art. Allmendinger clings to cliché.

The Melon Capital of the World reads like a very early therapy session, before trust is established, when the patient’s narrative wends its way from simplicity to simplicity, from defense to defense. Though racial, economic, class, gender, and sexual identity differences structure and divide the western town of Rocky Ford, little energy is spent examining those divisions or their impact on the memoir’s central character, his mother, Rose Mary, or even himself. Mentioning seems to suffice, as though the complexity of such differences, along with the challenges of memory, childhood abuse, and tangled longing are not evident in the front the memoir stoically and in painfully stereotypical western style puts forward. What was the uncounted cost, for instance, of his bargain with his mother to attend therapy to “cure” his homosexuality in order to secure his college tuition? [End Page 273]

By the end, though, anguished versions of his mother and the devastation of her mental illness press through the wall of words Allmendinger erects to keep emotion, passion, and devastation from the text. Pregnancy and an unhappy marriage thwart Rose Mary’s ambitions as a fashion designer; she is abusive to her children, regretting aloud her decision not to abort Allmendinger, and threatening to kill herself. Yet, too, we see a woman trapped in a mental illness she is aware of but cannot control. When Allmendinger goes to her home after her death, he finds filth and chaos: the signs of a hoarder, the material evidence of a mind, and a life, caving in on itself. The “diary” entry he finds and includes in his final chapter singes with pain, guilt, love, anger, and homicidal fantasies...

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