The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt By Mark Athitakis

Abstract

Midwesterners always live, it seems, in an age of lead, the eon even meaner than Hesiod’s own contemporary “Iron” age, all misery and decay, casting nostalgic glances back on the cast of cast-off ages, the more precious alloys and ores—Bronze, Silver, Gold. The gist of the old metallurgy haunts the subtitle of Mark Athitakis’s fine guidebook, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt: the oxidation of wistfulness, the boketto sigh of the looking back on looking back, that green breast of a new world always obviously out there, always out of reach. “You should have seen the lake in my day, now that was a great Great Lake!” But to his great credit, Athitakis in this archeological dig of the heartland’s literary bottomland neither stratifies the mildewy cultural milieu nor selects works and authors steeped in the crick-necked, over-the- shoulder gape into the goldengrassed past. I wish I could recreate here the graphic crag captured on the book’s lead-colored cover—the NEW careted in between the THE and the MIDWEST—that illustrates the illustrious work this book does, wedging apart the tattoo of charred cartography, the midden of mighthave- beens, the runes of ruined ruin.