Rising Darkness in the Midwest

PERHAPS A NEW MYTHOLOGY is in the breeding around and about the Midwest, a kind of metaphorical setting that catches America and chokes up a seed which somehow holds a whole country. They say that there is a place in Missouri somewhere, where you can stand looking west and know that there is nothing but solid unbroken wheat for a thousand miles. These fields are sparsely but evenly inhabited, just as they are among the corn to the north. Richard Nixon was one of the first to point out something special about the people here--that they are silent. Other things are strange and haunting in a land like this: all is not good clean work and healthy abundance in the Sacred Middle, and artists are just beginning to find this interesting.

David Rhodes, in a brilliant first novel called The Last Fair Deal Going Down, shows he knows about the Midwest. Because Rhodes grew up out of it, loving it and hating it, a strong and peculiar relationship to the heartland pervades his book. Picking the hardcover up from the shelf--stark black lettering looming, out from a staring white with the braille letter punched neatly underneath, you can leaf through and get a quick sense. The copyright page announces that the novel is "translated from the braille by David Rhodes," although Rhodes is not blind. The inside leaf is bereft of the usual publicity hoo-hah hinting at a lurid plot: someone saw fit to give nothing but an extended quotation from the text. The book introduces itself. But the immediate geographic vibration arises from the photographs interspersed--black and white pictures of Des Moines, Iowa; flat images of a ghost-town desolation, aching vistas of an earthiness that turned out drab and vacuous.

Des Moines is the setting of this dark allegory: as an environment it grows (or decays) along with the story. The narrator is obsessed by it.

This country, Iowa. I can tell you about it. It is so much of me that sometimes I am confused: sometimes I believe it is more important--that is the land and the city, Des Moines, that speaks through me, using me the way I imagine I am using them. The earth itself is wet black and you can shove a spade down into it up to the handle without hitting a rock. A tin can will grow here...The narrator's muffled but desperately articulate voice speaks as if from a dungeon of alienation: the voice pleads with the reader for understanding, and as the speaker surfaces out of the narrative sporadically to grope at us, the torture of writing such a chronicle becomes a major theme. With a style like that of a mole burrowing furiously inches below the soil, sending up a series of tiny explosions of dirt, Rhodes has created a narrator that is some kind of seventies' Underground Man.

The Sledge family lives in Des Moines, and their mythic existence in this hinterland at America's heart forms the main thread of the action. Luke Sledge, who drinks a pint of whiskey a day and two on Saturday ("the cells of his body gulped whiskey like a tree drinking water out of the ground, pulling it up into its roots and sending it out into the farthest, highest leaves") is the father. He has a wife and many sons, and one daughter, Nellie, who is blind: the book is dedicated to her. It is the youngest son--Reuben--who tells the story. The fantasy - allegory comes early, when it is explained to the family, newly arrived in town, that there is an underground city beneath Des Moines, a fogshrouded pit of unspeakable horror into which people, when they have been driven to the edge, enter and never return.

No one knows what the inside looks like...except those who have gone in, I suppose, if they can see: the wet heavy air--fog--has over the years collected in the hole and the sun does not go more than a hundred feet into it. The children are afraid of this place. There are many stories about it. Occasionally teachers from the college talk about it, but to the rest of us it is neither evil nor godly. We ignore it.

The last third of the book is taken up with the journey of Reuben through The City, into which he plunges after a long struggle with manic depression and bad luck. The City is an inferno with eerie similarities to the surface world that Reuben has just left. The inhabitants of The City survive in a condition they cannot bear and cannot conceive of escaping from. They endure by shooting heroin (the whole book could work on the level of a descent into a junkie's world), by eating human flesh out of insane hunger; they cower in corners to avoid facing each other; they go to movie houses and play pool.

IN ORDER to pull this off without sensationalism or cliche, Rhodes's style has to be cinematically vivid without being florid. He has to be personal enough to carry conviction, familiar enough to take us with him. Ambitious as he is, amazingly, he succeeds. It is rather frightening to realize--after reading a recent Time article ("Cannibalism in the Cordillera") or any newspaper, any day--that this writer's maniacal vision is hardly hyperbole.

He succeeds because he has clearly had experience with the proverbial condition of "Edge City." He knows about the brink and the abyss, and he cares passionately about bringing this book to birth. He never labors his allegory, or cheapens his surrealism into fairy tale moralism. The method is a radical one, paradoxically, in that it hearkens back to an earlier age of the novel (and this must be a good thing) by working with the intensity of dramatic scenes--a throwback to Dostoyevsky. By taking diverse experience and building situations wherein he can forge these loose elements into a crystallized, jewelled point of metaphor, Rhodes is externalizing in a very sophisticated way. Episode after episode with the Sledges operates in this way; so does the whole trip through The City.

Notable is a section that takes place not long before Reuben Sledge goes down into The City. Life gradually drags him into total withdrawal: he spends day after day festering alone in bed, drawing into himself, utterly isolated in a concrete cellar room. He reads a lot of books: they depress him, increase his loneliness. He stops reading, and as he struggles to hang on to his sanity he becomes excruciatingly familiar with every individual cement block in the cell. Fighting to keep from fading entirely to within his own head, his lunge at reality turns to memorizing each idiosyncrasy on the surface of the four walls. He begins, then, to attach string to certain points on the concrete, connecting juttings of plaster, establishing relationships, labeling them. Finally he becomes so frenzied that the room fills with string, crisscrossing all over, so dense that it obstructs his vision. He has intellectualized himself into the corner of a jungle, and he just barely escapes. An interior monologue like this, constructing a purely self-contained psychological state, is incredibly difficult to sustain. But Rhodes's instincts are so sure in this "head" writing that you are completely captivated by it.

RHODES IS MORE than just another mad apocalyptic genius. There is a basic country-storyteller streak in him, and a good grounding in the blunt candor of the agrarian Midwest. His lack of urbanity is replaced by a prodigious experience: we believe that he cannot imagine people really talking any other way than without pretense. With a natural sense of rough, monotonal dialogue and plodding, deadpan humor, he can do some amazing things. At one point Reuben is looking for work. He sees a want ad for a job as a farm hand, and goes to visit the old farmer at his place, who has told him over the phone that he had better know something about nails, because he's got some new ones that are "eight times harder":

"Hello," I said.

"Take a look at these nails," he said, and put one in my hand.

"Just a fish hook," I said.

"Just like a fish hook," he said and took a hammer from his overalls. He drove one of the notorious nails into an upright beam in the barn, up to a quarter-inch from its head.

"Try to pull that out," he said, handing me the hammer. I pulled it out. It seemed eight times harder than a normal nail.

"That's harder than a normal nail," I said.

"Eight times harder," he said.

It is all the more appalling when an Iowan like this goes down into The City.

In a novel so full of stark sillouettes it is too bad when the lucidity breaks down. There are some things that Rhodes cannot communicate: Reuben himself tells us that he is not altogether sure what finally got him out of The City, into the "finished, unfinished position" at which he finds himself when the book ends. He thinks that it has something to do with his sister Nellie, but there seems to be an emotion here that is too powerful and complex for him to convey: the isolation he laments throughout the novel finally cuts him off from the reader. There should be more than just echoes of Nellie. Perhaps sometimes the sealed resonance of the style (reading the book is like probing through a cave) could put people off, making them wary of contrived profundity, of too imposing a persistence in what the author is trying to say.

But this last tentative objection may be reactionary: we are used to ephemeral contemporary novelists (for example, Updike) who find beautiful ways of circumventing and clever ways to hedge. Rhodes's is a new and highly original kind of realism. We need it badly, but it will be hard to accept without more from the same young writer.

You leave The Last Fair Deal Going Down as from the complete cycle of a drug--reeling, dazed, and adjusting again to an old reality in a new way. The brooding silence of the Midwest is manic and never bucolic like it was. There may be a quieter, more determined explosion building up there--a tension less frenetic than the cities, less jaded than the South, and less crazily precarious than the Far West. The Middle West could begin to figure in American literature in a big way, and the heart of our country could become the backdrop for the heart of our despair.