Plain Spoken is a new monthly column on literature and the Midwest
As Marilynne Robinson is fond of noting, it is all too easy for Americans to overlook the Middle West’s historic fusion of agrarian life with a commitment to the life of the mind. How many nations’ farmscapes are so generously studded with sturdy liberal arts colleges? From small-town libraries to the lyceum circuit to the Writers’ Workshop, Iowans lifelong and temporary have been reading and taking notes for a long time. It isn’t only as the birthplace of chiropractic that Iowa has been known to crack spines.
This monthly column will explore the long and diverse history of literature’s Midwestern engagements. There is an established canon of American literature in which the Midwest plays heavily, as a both physical and social place. Names like Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and Carl Sandburg come to mind. Great though these figures are — and we will certainly read and learn from them — the history of literature by and about Midwesterners is wide, diverse in the fullest sense of the word, and often kind of weird. Let’s read it together. The smallest of narrative details shall not be permitted to squeeze right past us.
As Emily Dickinson would have said if she had had a Cockney accent: Ope is the thing with feathers.
It’s a point of pride for many Iowans that in 2009, Iowa became the first state in the Midwest, and third in the nation, to recognize LGBT marriage equality. It is somewhat less remembered that in the years after that unanimous ruling, three of the seven Iowa Supreme Court judges who rendered it lost their jobs in judicial retention elections. Or that in the wake of 2015’s Obergefell decision, six years after Iowa’s, former governor Terry Branstad reacted by calling for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
At the time, Branstad spoke for a shrinking but real minority of Iowans. In the Reaganite 1980s, he would have spoken for the majority. Iowa native Patrick Moore’s moving, ambitious and sadly out-of-print novel Iowa (1996) depicts what that reality meant for closeted teenagers in the state’s small towns. These include Moore’s “hometown” — the novel troubles this label — of Cherokee, current pop. 5,199, in the state’s especially conservative northwest corridor. The year after the novel’s release, Steve King won his first election in the nearby sixth district of the Iowa Senate.
The first half of Moore’s novel, titled “Gone,” follows 18-year-old Wayne as he lusts after unattainable classmates, daydreams about New York City, endures awkward father-son silences made bearable only by the détente device of shared TV-viewing, and spends lots of quality time in the bathroom with vintage magazine writing not reprintable in this forum. Let it suffice that the title of Dad’s Back — the magazine story we are treated to long, long mise en abyme excerpts of — is as much a possessive noun phrase as an ejaculative exclamation of family warmth. Wayne is also preyed upon by the high school drama teacher, a sexually deranged religious fanatic.
The novel’s second half is set 10 years later and follows Wayne’s return to Cherokee from New York City upon the death of a relative. The section is titled “Back,” this time less suggestively and more allusively, forming with its partner title a gesture in the direction of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an important book for Wayne. In this half, Wayne isn’t just reading the smut, he’s living and writing it, in another story-within-a-story sprint facilitated by not only the off-page decade of stimulating experience, but also by the comparative quiet of Iowa, which the maturing narrator has found a way to appreciate. In a psychologically complex passage, Wayne’s fictional protagonist — whose name is Patrick: the postmodern ’90s! — visits an S&M club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. If you consider the countersocial rage of the youthful narrator, reminiscent of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and you mix it with this lavishly depicted leather den of greased-up props and pseudo-cops, you realize that an alternative title for this section might have been “Journey to the End of the Nightstick.”
Even though the storied Meatpacking District is an unsurprising neighborhood for such a scene, it’s not incidental. The novel repeatedly forges a link (sausage pun intended) between sex and animal agriculture. Sometimes this is explicit, as when the high school drama teacher’s erotic monologue contains meat on hooks. And sometimes it is simply woven into the language, as when, in the midst of a rare erotic encounter in Cherokee, which in the novel is a meatpacking town, Wayne thinks: “This meeting of flesh that stretches on and on is but one short moment. Immerse it in a protective casing and preserve what little happiness there might be in soft lips meeting briefly.”
Despite its sensitive sketches of the women in Wayne’s family, the novel is a sausage-fest in this one sense. What motivates this meat motif, other than the novel’s desire, through its campier and pulpier elements, to singe the eyebrows of the petty bourgeoisie?
To my mind, the answer has partly to do with the novel’s sophisticated interest in the way desire can draw us toward the exotic or to the mundane. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the book is only interested in promiscuity. The second half is haunted by the death from AIDS of Wayne’s lover Jack, about which Moore writes movingly. Possibly as a psychic reaction to Jack’s thinning away, Wayne’s libido longs for rounded-out, paunchy men. Wayne’s fictional narrator observes a bodybuilder and thinks that he “lacked the normality, the everyday quality in his body that drove Patrick wild.” In the novel, this desire for bodily normality (what is referred to on social media these days as a “dad bod”) seems tied to a hunger for authenticity.
This is an admirably unembarrassed book. Like Salinger, in the novel’s first half Moore does not shirk his duty to capture, irritant or no, the spectacular contortions of adolescent self-involvement. But forthrightness here is as much a matter of style as content. Like Kerouac, Moore risks sounding ludicrous, such as when he describes the ambient noise of late-evening Cherokee as “the velvet gurgle of small sounds.” (Synesthesia is a favored move of Moore’s: in a striking sentence, Wayne puts in differently colored contact lenses “[a]s a tribute to Bowie,” hoping that his LSD-tripping love interest “would look at these eyes as if they were ideas.”) The fact that here or there a sentence is ludicrous is no great matter. Recall that whole volumes of Melville’s are unremittingly silly.
I am not saying that readers will find a second, lost Melville in Moore. But the comparison is no accident, because Moore is a talented and unduly neglected practitioner of an American Romantic tradition that connects Captain Ahab to Neal Cassady. There is a traceable genealogy from Ahab to Neal Cassady in Iowa‘s sentiment, “This was such an establishment, perched on the sharp edge of residential Manhattan, where the river drew an array of those who searched through the night. They searched for what? Unimportant. They searched.”
Virginia Woolf gets brought up throughout the book, and one passage employs Woolfian strategies to depict the intermingling of different characters’ consciousnesses. She stretched this project furthest in The Waves. Moore stretches the technique in a different sense, when pivoting in medias run-on from the mind of a masturbating pastor to the mind of a masturbating Daughter of the American Revolution: “…but what about that beefy choirboy and now that finger slips up his ass and the head of the DAR finds herself with one finger in her pussy and another wiggling in her tight butt,” etc.
One reason the novel is out of print is undoubtedly its original publisher, which ran it under a pornographic imprint called Hard Candy Books. If you flip to the “You May Also Like…” listings at the back of the book, you’ll mostly find gay erotica of the more cracker-barrel sort, but with exceptions. I’d like to get my hands on Torsten Barring’s novel Peter Thornwell, which is described as a “torrid take on Horatio Alger” (?!) in which Thornwell “goes from misspent youth to scandalous stardom, all thanks to an insatiable libido and love for the lash.” In the course of my research process I discovered that the phone line advertised amid the fiction, 1-900-745-HUNG, has long ago hung up for good.
The publisher’s lack of prestige is a shame, because Iowa is a serious novel. It is no more pornographic than a novel like Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, which enjoys a Vintage International edition and cult classic status. Presently, you’ll have a harder time finding it than Hollinghurst, but if you want an honest, imperfect, winsomely audacious gay coming-of-age story from the recent and still palpable past, read Patrick Moore.
