The rust belt is getting more attention than it’s had in a long time. Since November an entire subgenre of journalism has been dedicated to understanding the people who elected the new president, many with datelines from Michigan or Ohio or Wisconsin.
The first, narrative half of the book is even more direct. “An important part of Midwestern identity is believing you don’t have an accent,” McClelland writes on the first page, that “there’s absolutely nothing exotic about Midwestern speech”—because there’s not supposed to be anything exotic about the midwest at all. How did that happen? McClelland writes that in the years after World War II, mass media executives settled on a particular strain of native-born white midwestern English as an all-American compromise between the elitist trans-Atlantic accent (think Katharine Hepburn), the various urban working-class ethnic accents (think Bernie Sanders), and the still-stigmatized southern drawls.
In other words, the region not only no longer resembles its wholesome heartland mythology—it never did. One of the book’s strongest passages considers the domestic, postwar Iowa-set novels of Marilynne Robinson. Interpreted by coastal reviewers as paeans to “goodness, a property Midwesterners like to think of as a regional birthright,” all-American stories “set in the deepest Midwest . . . driven by hope,” Athitakis scratches their surface and finds “novels [about] the Civil Rights Movement, poverty, violence, prostitution, troubled faith, and failure.” He quotes Robinson herself on her novel Home, whose title is not what it might seem: “If you say about a 45-year-old man that he has gone back home, it tends to mean that the world hasn’t worked out.”
In interviews, Trubek has said that one of her chief difficulties has been tapping into some sense of regional solidarity: getting, say, Clevelanders to care about what happens in Detroit, and vice versa. That means these two books are seeking to create an audience, not just find one. And they’re making an argument many midwestern readers might be skeptical of: that we’re part of a coherent region at all. That our fates are somehow connected, even if our ideals are not. v
By Edward McClelland (Belt) McClelland will be reading at Tuesday Funk Tue 3/7, 7:30 PM Hopleaf 5148 N. Clark 773-334-9851hopleaf.com Free
The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt By Mark Athitakis (Belt)
Athitakis reads from The New Midwest Wed 3/8, 6:30 PM City Lit Books 2523 N. Kedzie 773-235-2523citylitbooks.com Free
