Reading 1Q84: The Case for Fiction in a Busy Life

In local parlance, a “free ride” means riding New Jersey Transit without buying a ticket. For years, that trick was easiest on the Morris-Essex line, with the double-decker trains going westbound from New York City. A free ride from Newark Broad Street to Dover was possible on the 8:19 pm train, using the following method. Step 1: enter the train in the midst of a crowd, far from a conductor. Step 2: move two cars forward. Don’t stop to peek at someone’s text, and don’t settle for an empty three-seater with a fresh copy of The New York Post. Step 3: choose a car with a clean-check: when the conductor brushes through upon boarding, collecting tickets but not clipping, giving receipts but sticking no slip in the flaps above seats. Step 4: Catch an open spot in a two-seater; pencil in hand with an open book is the best disguise. If an overzealous conductor somehow reaches your car, avoid eye contact. If I were caught, this would be my Step 5: show the conductor my monthly pass, apologize, and explain that I am a fiction writer.

I would never steal a free ride, but would gladly accept one if New Jersey Transit, or Amtrak, offered. I am not the only rider willing to accept that gift. Consider the social media frenzy that erupted when writers recently discovered Amtrak’s free writing residencies. The Wire’s coverage of the story’s background was the single-most shared literary link I’d ever seen. What writer, laptop on a folded-down food tray, or notebook on knee, doesn’t wish they could spend hours drafting on those rails? Dream evolved into reality because of a December 2013 PEN America interview with novelist Alexander Chee, where he says trains are his favorite place to write: “I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers.” Jessica Gross read Chee’s interview and tweeted her own desire for such a residency. Amtrak offered her a free “test run.” She accepted, and took a round trip on the Lake Shore Limited from New York to Chicago: “thirty-nine hours in transit — forty-four, with delays.” At The Paris Review, her romantic description of that residency’s spartan, utilitarian space would entice any writer interested in solitude: a 3’ 6” by 6’ 8” sleeper cabin with a window, “two plush seats,” a sliding, chessboard-topped table, a sink, cups, towels, soap, and curtains that can be drawn over two windows facing the corridor. As Gross notes, “I’m only here for the journey.” She was “ensconced” in order to write.

Gross shares how other writers love the schedule of train travel: “Anne Korkeakivi described train travel as ‘suspended impregnable time,’ combined with ‘dreamy’ forward motion: ‘like a mantra, it greases the brain.’” Even writing about writing on trains feels natural. Gross refers to Emily St. John Mandel’s fine essay here at The Millions, which describes a very different type of train: the New York City subway system. There she “scrawl[ed] fragments” of her third novel on “folded-up wads of scrap paper, using a book” as her desk. Mandel notes that reading is ubiquitous on the subway, but writing is rare. That’s understandable. Subways are about connections and changes, quick closing doors and an absence of conductors roaming the cars. Trains are longer commitments, more conducive to settling into one’s seat, tuning out, and letting the steady ride transport the mind.

I have done my fair share of writing on trains, but prefer them as places to read. My train reading is associative: one book leads into another. Lately I’ve been riding the train most often in summers: hour-plus routes that begin in Netcong and Dover and end at the Broad Street, Newark station. I teach a sport literature course at Rutgers-Newark that runs July through August, so one such train-reading litany began with Don DeLillo’s End Zone. The refrain of “hit somebody, hit somebody, hit somebody” complimented the repetition of my ride: run, slow, stop, start. End Zone sent me to a more recent DeLillo, Point Omega, which is a thinner read, but more directly engages the evolutionary theories of Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. My edition of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man fell apart when I reached page 36, which ends with this sentence: “In such a vision man is seen not as a static centre of the world — as he for long believed himself to be — but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer.” I had to reach under the seat in front of me to grab the pages that broke from the bitter spine.

Teilhard’s thought is recursive, so I then chose to re-read On Being Blue, William Gass’s 1976 treatise on that color, emotion, and concept: “a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects.” Gass sent me to The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Was there ever a writer more syntactically appropriate for the train? “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story” might be inscrutable, but it is still a literary ride. I admit to not finishing Stein’s collection, and other books, that I begin on the train. My relationships with books might last for an entire afternoon, one half of a round trip, or only between stops. Stein’s wordplay inspired me to revisit Patrick Madden’s excellent essay collection, Quotidiana. His short but packed essays are a perfect fit for trains. One essay, “Remember Death,” moves from the band Rush to Montaigne to Mr. Lamb (one of Madden’s high school English teachers that I also had — we are from the same hometown) to Sts. Jerome and Anthony. I moved from the breadth of an essay collection to the depth of a memoir: Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia by Blake Butler, which now reads like an elegy for his late father. Butler’s labyrinthine prose made the train car feel comfortably claustrophobic.

After a helping of non-fiction, I longed for the escape of fiction again. James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime is never so romantic and heartbreaking as when it is read on a train. The longing in Paul Lisicky’s Lawnboy felt perfectly metered across multiple stops, and painfully final when the train pulled into the yard at Dover, out of service. I often return to the underappreciated James Alan McPherson when thinking writers, trains, and endings. McPherson worked as a dining-car waiter on the Great Northern Railroad in 1962. Then came Harvard Law School and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but a life on the rails never left him. He edited Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture with poet Miller Williams, and also wrote two train-related stories, “On Trains,” and my favorite, “A Solo Song: For Doc, ” an elder dining-car waiter’s advice to a new hire. These words might have been spoken to McPherson himself: “There’ll always be summer stuff like you, but the big men, the big trains, are dying every day and everybody can see it. And nobody but us who are dying with them gives a damn.”

I prefer prose to poetry on the train, but there’s a place for verse in transit. Tyehimba Jess’s development of persona in Leadbelly metaphorically matches the transformative aspect of travel, the possibility that we might be reborn in a new place. I’ve read and prepared reviews for Maybe the Saddest Thing by Marcus Wicker, Fables by Sarah Goldstein, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie by Joshua Harmon, Copperhead by Rachel Richardson, and browsed poems in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, and Poetry. My favorite single poem to discover on the train is, coincidentally, “Love Train” by Tomás Q. Morín. I first heard it discussed in a Poetry magazine podcast, but read the full poem on the actual page. A woman asks for “Earl Grey cookies / sandwiched around buttercream or marshmallows / made of chocolate,” but her husband returns from the dining car with his “bowl brimming with pretzels, / the snack you wanted least.” That’s not the only problem: “When I came bearing the salted and twisted news, / the room was empty but for a heel.” He’s forgotten their room number on the train, so he opens every door “marked with threes and eights,” waking strangers “like a beggar, no, an angel, / a begging angel who has written on his heart / WILL WORK FOR LOVE.” Frustrated, all he finds are “row upon row of couples asleep,” or riders “staring out the windows like zombies,” unsure what to do “once the newspaper is well-thumbed, / the tea has gone cold, and the conversation is dead.” He finally discovers his wife “in a cafe / in a city we didn’t know, where she is “slowly eat[ing] / a dish of whipped cream and bananas.” Hearts broken and healed, in transit.

At The New Yorker, Vauhini Vara wonders what will happen when the romantic excitement for Amtrak’s residencies subsides, and we get down to dollars and cents. She also makes a smart comparison with David Foster Wallace’s sideways glance at Frank Conroy’s “essaymercial,” “My Celebrity Cruise, or ‘All this and a Tan, Too,’” which Conroy was paid to write. Amtrak’s social-media director, Julia Quinn, told Vara these writer residences are “the most organic form of advertising for us — different people on our trains and exposing their audience to what long-distance travel is like.” The key word here is audience: “We are a for-profit organization, so we are definitely determining when the best time is to send these people. I’m not going to send all of the residents in May, June, and July during our peak system, when we could be selling those tickets.” No one expects Amtrak to offer these residences without any strings, and certainly writers are not the demographic that needs charity the most. But this might be a good time to dull the cynical blade and embrace optimism. I hope Amtrak develops these introductory residencies into a full program, and that these writers are inspired to create new work, breathe life into old drafts, and maybe even enjoy some good reading.

Image via p_x_g/Flickr

Driving to Des Moines, Iowa, I picked up a hitchhiker, a young man from San Diego who’d spent the past few months in the Midwest and was traveling to Chicago. On the way to the city, we talked about various things: our points of origin; politics after passing a field plowed into the shape of Mitt Romney’s logo; literature, from Joyce to McCarthy and Dickens, “you should try to serialize your work;” to the troubles of meeting people on the plains. “It’s just so spread out,” he said.

I was coming from Nebraska, a new arrival myself, headed east to visit a friend. Before I came across the hitchhiker, I’d been thinking about two authors local to the area, Tom Drury and David Rhodes, and their works. In particular I was thinking about a scene from Drury’s Hunts in Dreams. In the scene, Charles Darling, a good for nothing from Drury’s earlier The End of Vandalism, sneaks into an old woman’s home to steal an heirloom shotgun and replace it with another. Hearing the woman come down the stairs, Charles takes a seat rather than risk a bullet on his way out. Before he can turn a light on, the woman, Farina, belts him with a coathanger. He tells her who he is, at which point she turns on the light and gives him some ice for his nose. After discussing the shotguns, Charles leaves with both, being decided the rightful owner of the heirloom. Where in the world could this be the end result of a midnight breaking and entering?

Though Drury’s book has no specific location other than a fictional Grouse County, after arriving in Des Moines, I would place my bet on Iowa — Drury was born there, after all. Upon arrival at my friend’s place, I was welcomed into the house in an offhanded sort of way, as if I were a local boy who came by every so often to play and eat whatever was on the counter. This is a peculiar sort of behavior, and it’s something I hadn’t seen since I actually was a child, living in a country cul-de-sac.

I grew up in Ohio. Until grad school, the largest city I’d ever lived in had a meager and falling population of 60,000. I grew up with blue collar people, veterans, farmers, but they were rarely who I read about. The little bit of literature I was exposed to in my early days was not rich in Midwestern ties. The Grapes of Wrath is closest, though Oklahoma is nebulously neither the Midwest nor the South. Aside from the geographically relevant works of Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison, there wasn’t a whole lot I’d read that I might consider Midwestern. The only real example is from my junior year in college, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which is set in Iowa in the 1950s. Robinson’s Iowa is as close as I’d come to the bucolia of my youth.

This, thankfully, changed once I set out beyond the Midwest itself. While in L.A. and San Francisco respectively, I stumbled on the works of Drury and Rhodes. Drury is famous for a verisimilitude in character and prose so exacting that it seems improbable, while Rhodes has built his books around a certain amount of the preternatural.

In The Last Fair Deal Going Down, Rhodes camps the Sledge family at the rim of an enormous hole in Des Moines. The Sledges, a hard, skilled people, are warned that there is another city within Des Moines, a “lower city,” which is the very pit in their backyard. The hole is covered in fog, emits strange sounds, and no one that enters ever returns. The protagonist, Reuben Sledge, must navigate both cities while witnessing the collapse of his family. Despite the unreal elements, Rhodes spends much of the book analyzing relatively normal people, and much of his later work examines Midwesterners with a bent approaching magical realism. These works are filled with the simple and stoic people I knew, the towns made of one or two intersections that aren’t worth a stoplight.

Then there is the new Midwest of the past few years. Bonnie Jo Campbell, Frank Bill, and Patrick Michael Finn’s Midwest. If the Midwest is not surreal, as with Drury and Rhodes, it is made hyper-real. The Midwest of Bill and Finn is full of the meth-addled and downtrodden. This is, admittedly, a Midwest I know as well as the other. My hometown is the drug capital of a drug-plagued county. The city I lived in before leaving for school was and is desperately poor. For all the Midwest’s evenhandedness, much of it has been embittered by the recession, and the work ethic we’re known for, when without direction, becomes destructive. The literature of this Midwest shows this side of us, the hardened and hungry folk. It forgets, largely, the generous people I know they co-exist with.

There is no disservice being done here, I think. While Drury is caught up in the day to day and Rhodes works unique bildungsromans, the new Midwestern writers pick up on the other side of the tracks. Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, explores the fallen industrial city of Joliet, Illinois, and its stories are as familiar to me as Drury’s. The accounting for this co-existence is a simple one: the Midwest accommodates an enormous amount of difference already. Instead of being a region known for a certain type of character (you cannot, I expect, call an Ohioan to mind as easily as a Californian, a Texan, a New Yorker), in truth the region is not only its own, but also the bridge between these disparate cultures and literatures. The Midwest holds part of both the Rust and Bible Belts, contains flatlands, hills, mountains in the Ozarks, and the beginnings of the Appalachians. I have seen cacti growing on a cliff in Nebraska, where just across a lake are the Sandhills, America’s best grazing land. In the Big Ten Conference alone people are known to bleed entirely different colors.

Midwestern literature rides this fence, trying to act both as its own entity — perhaps why its residents are so often somehow extra-real — and as a bridge between literatures. This is, I think, the answer behind our relative quiet, that and our native stoicism. Our literature often enough hops over into the Western, much of it goes Southern. Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, conversely, sounds Midwestern to my ear, despite taking place in Colorado. In much the same way that the Central Ohioan accent is the American norm — the accent you hear every day on the news — Midwestern literature has perhaps simply been shelved as “American.”

Leaving Iowa just a few nights ago, I was struck by the similarity of the land in the dark to a number of places I had been. In an hour, I saw a field of wind turbines that reminded me of the Texas Panhandle. The shadows of the Loess Hills looked like southeastern Ohio in hour two, and rounding certain corners I expected to be bathed in the gold light that rolls across the horizon in southern California. The Iowa of Drury and Rhodes, the hitchhiker’s bridge across the country. I saw all of that, and after three hours I was home.