A Midwest Mindscape

PIRHAPS the most intriguing aspect of Alive and Dead in Indiana lies in the title itself. In this collection of eight brief stories, author Michael Martone emphasizes first one and then another facet of the title. Through it, he explores the manner in which truth somehow becomes a process of canonization. Though the popular legends around which these stories revolve range from James Dean to Ezra pound, the author exhibits a unity of purpose to depict a particular state of mind where the boundary between truth and fiction becomes hazy and indistinct. At the heart of these shitting surfaces lies Indiana itself, where these legends are tended and kept alive nameless, faceless acolytes.

Martone uses a wide and various last of narrators in his stories, yet only one voice speaks throughout the book: the voice of the accomplice, self-conscious and self-effacing. Iypically, the accomplice relates a story which concerns a well-known name-Alfred Kinsey, John Dillinger and others. Yet despite the famous names. Martone makes it clear that the stories significance rests not in the identify of the relevant celebrity but rather in the fact of the name itself; the name which motivates the narrator to reveal. Shyly and obliquely, his own story. We, the readers, are asked not to consider the veracity of these stories but simply to respond to the storyteller's appeal. "Now it's your turn to tell me what this is all about," asserts the narrator of the second story, which concerns the "Colonel Sanders" of tried chicken fame. Fragments of truth or even of speculation from the base around which the stories are built. The narrator of the third story summarizes a pearl as "perfection out of irritation. Here, the truth is the irritation around which is secreted the perfection of the story.

The narrators themselves from a sixteen-year old chemistry students to a middle-aged fraternity housemother, each struggle to discover or regain, their distinct identify, Ultimately, they seize upon the same potential solution--conscious identification with a famous name. (For John Dillinger, his own name.) Through this reflected or retracted glory they try to escape the squalled nature of their own lives. A nameless drama teacher dreams of the time when she taught James Dean "to kiss... and to die." A young woman writes to her missionary lover missing in China (John Birch) without hope of a reply. She writes "I think you can keep someone alive. I keep."

The ideas of dislocation in time and isolation in society recur throughout the book. The first story, "Everybody watching and the time passing Like That." Pivots around the moment suspended in time, when the drama teacher is told of James Dean's death. For a sixteen-year-old working for the summer in a historically reconstructed fort. "It is always the summer of 1816." The fraternity housemother spends her life surrounded by young men of unvarying age.

These disparate characters spend their time, such as it exists, furtively scrutinizing each other. "We did not care who was watching us watching," remarks Alfred Kinsey; yet, they are careful, instinctively, to avoid revealing anything about themselves. The housemother wistfully recollects an accidental and inconclusive encounter with Ezra pound years ago-an evening spent listening to his soliloquizing, declaiming to the air forgetful of her colorless presence. Surrounded by irrefutable evidence of the futility of her existence, she tries to imbue this did not have by keeping it a carefully guarded secret.

All this makes for slow action; a static quality pervades the stories. There is no movement or direction; the stories are themselves suspended in time. The narrators try to relate episodes which encompass vast spans of time and succeed only in describing trivial incidents meaningless in themselves. Guessing, wondering, regretting, and yearning constitute most of the action in these episodes. The tendency is to pause and to look inside, silently.

THE STORIES are pieces which fit together to form one composite and complex picture. Martone commands a style well-suited to this type of writing often manages to cross the border which separates prose and poetry, thanks to his fine eye and ear for detail and his effective use of evocative imagery. Long roads, Shiny cars, pearls and falling bombs appear and reappear-sometimes as characters in their own right. Suggestive images are the chief vehicles of expression; dialogue is absent, and even the speaking, external voice is rate. In this silent landscape, only isolated single phrases are whispered or shouted over a great distance.

In "Vocation," the ultimate story of the cycle and the only one which fails to feature a celebrated name, Martone address the questions concerning the writer's art and its implied power. Abandoning all conventions, he rapidly juxtaposes images of beauty and destruction in the manner of a slide show to convey a sense of the importance and the impossibility of the writer's craft. The story ends, literally, up in the air, with aerial photographers. The landscape of Indiana recedes; the faceless narrator emerges.