"State by State" inspired by guides

• By GREG LANGLEY
• books editor
• Published: Oct 12, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Fifty states, 50 writers — all collected in one book. It’s hard to imagine a better deal. State by State, A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco, $29.95) was inspired by the old WPA American Guides produced by the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression. It was hard times for writers during the ’30s and early ’40s, and even prominent authors like Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neal Hurston, Studs Terkel and many others were glad to get some work. Each of those WPA guides featured unsigned essays and photos and other material relating to the state that was its subject.

Inspired by that example, Matt Wieland and Sean Wilsey have compiled essays on each of the 50 states from a wide variety of writers. The WPA American Guides were groundbreaking and innovative, but always factual. State by State is experimental and subjective and features some wild takes on each state.

The piece on Louisiana was written by New Orleans-based writer Josh Clark. He’s not a native Louisianian and his piece is not about any place but New Orleans. Lately, it’s been impossible to read anything about New Orleans that doesn’t begin and end with Katrina. That’s understandable. It’s the ending part that Josh is all about. His first-person narrative is about ghosts in the houses of Katrina victims. He brings in a crew of paranormal investigators and visits houses where telltale rescue hieroglyphics reveal someone died.

“I see body bags all over the floor,” one of the team, Angel, tells Clark during a visit to a gutted church. At another site, Angel says he senses the presence of a ghost as he leans in a window. “He’s holding my hand right now.”

At another site where 10 people died in a house, Angel tells Clark, “I can hear buildings crashing into each other. The sound was horrible. Like a monster coming through here. They keep reliving it.”

Clark’s point in his well-written essay is that much of New Orleans is gone, ghostly. It would have been good if a piece on Louisiana in this book had focused on what is not gone. Clark is fine, but it would have been wonderful to see a piece by a Louisiana writer like James Lee Burke who knows both Bourbon Street and the dusty roads that crisscross the cane fields of Acadiana.

It is hard to pull a whole state together in a short essay. Big states, like Texas, are really a challenge since they vary a great deal from one part to another. Some of the writers, like Clark, were people who had moved to the state recently. Cristina Henriquez moved to Texas from Iowa. She is of Panamanian descent. She lived in Texas a while, then left. She describes the heavy lore that sometimes obscures the reality of the place.

“Texas, of course, is more than its surface and stereotypes. Every place is. But the lore associated with Texas seems to be piled thicker than for other states. You have to drill down deep to get to what lies beneath.”

She goes on to describe Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and places in between. She reveals how beguiling she found the state and how she resisted its pull while she lived there. Now though, she misses Texas.

Mississippi’s essay is a melancholy rumination from Barry Hannah about how he loathed his home state in his youth but somehow managed to wind up living there again in his old age. He says in the second paragraph that he is dying from Non-Hodgkins lymphoma and that sense of impending doom colors the rest of the essay, which is really more about Hannah than Mississippi. The same is true of the piece on Virginia by Tony Horowitz, who wrote the very funny book Confederates in the Attic about Civil War re-enactors. Horowitz’s take on the Old Dominion is a very funny piece about Civil War re-enactors and Civil War observances mixed in with some real history. Like Henriquez, Horowitz is not a native of the state he is writing about, and, like her, he moved away and writes that he now misses his former home.

There are some odd contributions here, a couple of essays in graphic form. Most are prose though. Each essay provides some food for thought. Novelist Ann Patchett, a native Tennessean, strives mightily to figure out something each of that state’s principal regions has in common and finally decides that it’s this: “The plants, I believe, have shaped this state more than people ever have.” So she rather neatly decides the tree falling in the forest debate. Her piece is very good, though, as are most of the essays in this collection. It’s outstanding and provides food for thought if not facts. The best of the essays? North Dakota by sublime writer Louise Erdrich, a native of that state.

“Shattering, spectacular, inescapable. The North Dakota sky is a former tallgrass prairie heaven tarp that stretches down on every side and quiets the mind. In the summer, distance melts off into a mirage, a jitter of shaking air on hot dust. When the sun is magnified by a dust storm it can fill the sky like a nuclear dawn. Sounds travel as far as the ear allows. Vision stretches as far as the eye can strain. Pure sky pulls you right out of yourself and yet bears down so close it seems crushing.”

Who wouldn’t want to be crushed by that prairie sky? This is the next best thing to going to North Dakota, although reading Erdrich’s essay will make you want to go see it in person. Just like the original WPA American Guides did.