Your Favorites

What’s Your Favorite Geographical Setting for American Fiction?

American Polymath’s panel of experts spent the first part of autumn 2009 dusting off their favorite paperbacks and figuring out where in the hell all the stories they like took place.

Essex County, New Jersey
To me, the Garden State has always typified the American experience, not only through its socio-economic diversity, but also through the population gradient of its urban/sub-urban/rural landscapes. New Jersey is much more than that which one sees at 65 mph from its omnipresent interstates and parkways. Most New Englanders and New Yorkers tend to cast aspersions on Jersyites for this such reason. New Jersey, in fact, is a complex system of urban areas, both 'developed' and 'developing,' sub-urban 'bedroom communities' for NYC commuters, and scenic near-rural areas of the southern and western counties. Additionally, it should be noted that the Appalachian National Scenic Trail runs through this state perceived by some as being "the Armpit of America." All of this exists within the context of a state with the highest population density in the US and the second highest median income, following it's mid-Atlantic mate, Maryland.

Philip Roth's 1959 debut work, Goodbye Columbus, provides an acurate portrait of the differences between two communities in Essex County, New Jersey. The story focuses on two characters, Neil of Newark and Brenda of Short Hills. While avoiding the obvious racial and religious differences between the two communities, Roth's story effectively demonstrates the degree to which classism existed between these two nearby towns. Newark was well-populated county seat with numerous working class families and Short Hills was and remains, one of the wealthiest communities in America (according to 2007 Census, Short Hills, NJ has a median family income of $200,000). Not quite a tale of the haves and the have-nots, Roth is able to illustrate the constraints of classism in post-war America, and weave them into a tale of young summer love. Roth, himself a Newark native, knows better than anyone, perhaps, the disparity that exists between these two Essex County hamlets. The power of place is not only central to Goodbye Columbus, but it can easily be considered a main character to Roth's debut.
-Nicholas Farrell

Montreal
I like my fiction set in the dirty old towns of the world. Whether it’s Nelson Algren’s Chicago or Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, I’m drawn to stories about inconvenient people and spaces.

My favorite dirty old town is the St. Urbain Street of Mordecai Richler. The Jewish Quarter of Montreal in the years after the war. Beneath the laundry hanging between the turn-of-the century tenements, there is a village brimming with young men like Duddy Kravitz, guys on the make, guys trying to move beyond the world of their fathers, and become something more than “grass beside the railroad tracks.”
-Clayton Trutor

Southern Appalachia
Geography - landscape - is what I'm most drawn to in fiction, and quite often I remember details of the setting from a book more clearly than elements of the plot. (I don't remember much of what actually happens in Sister Carrie, for instance, but I still feel like I'm well acquainted with turn-of-the-century Chicago.) If I had to choose a favorite, it would be southern Appalachia (where they pronounce it with all short A's, rather than the northern "Appa-LAY-chia"). Specifically, I think western North Carolina is about the most perfect setting for a piece of fiction, though I'm more than happy to read fiction from the surrounding areas in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee or northwest South Carolina. I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to that region, but the last novel I read that was set there - Ron Rash's Serena- tells you everything you need to know about human nature or America."
-Jon Sealy

Chicago
Theodore Dreiser. Upton Sinclair. Saul Bellow. Edna Ferber. Nelson Algren. Carl Sandburg. Nella Larsen. Stuart Dybek. Mike Royko. James T. Farrell. Richard Wright. Chicago, you are one gritty bastard.
-Francis Lilley

Cumorah: Manchester, New York
My Favorite Geographical Location for American Fiction is Cumorah in Manchester, New York. Cumorah is a drumlin, derived from the Gaelic word druim (“rounded hill,” or “mound”), an elongated whale-shaped hill formed by glacial action. Apparently when you are traveling through upstate New York, Minnesota, Poland, Estonia or Antarctica, you are looking at drumlins all the time and don’t know it. This particular drumlin delivered up the Golden Plates buried by the angel Moroni to treasure hunter Joe Smith and spawned one of the most baffling fictions in America today: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
-Barry Trutor

The Island from “The Most Dangerous Game”
The Island from "The Most Dangerous Game." Every novel should be set on that Island, with General Zaroff. He was such a cool villain. Nothing creepier than a dude who hunts people.
-Dominick Desjardins

The American Southwest
The deserts of the American Southwest. The desert is where the best saints (anchorites) and sinners (outlaws) are fashioned. There is nothing but a calm, stillness devoid of even the sound of running water or the wind in the trees. The landscape itself is fictional compared to our civilizations of endless noise, its visage Martian in ruddy mockery of Pocahontas, Thoreau, and the deceivingly labeled "green" movement.
-J.G. Koefoed

There’s something to be said for reading about the area you grew up in. It’s like looking at pictures of your first house as a child, you get to feel that twinge of nostalgia without actually having to think about all those times you spilled on the carpet. That’s how I feel when I read fiction about the Southwest. The area’s cowboy history gives it a legacy among other troubled places like the South. Yet surrounded by such wide-open desert, expanses of brown, and occasional mountain popping up, it was easy to develop a chip on my shoulder about the beautiful Americana that the landscape makes up. One of my favorite portrayals of that region is in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang where he takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the typical Southwestern persona and truly gets to the heart of the restless desire and boredom that people who come from the area know all too well. When I read Abbey’s novel, it was easy to forget my resentment toward growing up in that sleepy region and remember that the Southwest is a part of the country unlike any other and, I guess, worth fighting for.
-Michael Schindel

Nebraska
I live in the mountains of southern Appalachia, and while this is the landscape that consumes my own mind, I love to read about Willa Cather’s Nebraskan prairie. I first read My Antonia when I was in the sixth grade. I believe it captured by imagination and lingered in my memory better than other major American novel that I was forced to read through high school and maybe into college. Years later, I visited Nebraska for a friend’s wedding and saw the part of the state where Cather, herself, grew up and lived. The land was unlike anything I had experienced in the eastern states. Though devoid of my beloved mountains, everywhere I looked was beautiful in a very different way than I was used to. More so, the land was wide and open and full of possibilities. After that trip, I went back and read My Antonia again, and Cather’s beautiful descriptions of her homeland became even clearer to me. In literature and American culture in general, the west has always represented the road to freedom and opportunity, but I want to say Cather uses the Nebraska landscape more beautifully than most other writers are capable of doing.
-Denton Loving

The Road
Dreams in Low Contrast: Cormac McCarthy's The Road 

For all its exquisitely detailed rendering of the Southeast in nuclear winter, Cormac McCarthy's The Road might as well take place in the landscape of dreams. This is a bleakly conservative book, indeed, indicative I believe not so much of how McCarthy sees our potential future as how he imagines our present—America as an absolute cultural, moral, even linguistic, desert wholly cut off from its past. A spiritual ash heap. That the film version, due to be released soon, was shot in color strikes me as misguided. If ever a narrative existed in black and white, The Road is it. And a low-contrast black and white, at that, the kind that blurs not only visual but metaphysical boundaries. Examined a little more closely, it's an allegory about the anxieties inherent in the transmission of "the faith"—widely, or perhaps not so widely, defined—from one generation to another. How to do this when all "the referents" have been "shorn away"? That's the real "light" the father carries—his memory of a world in which the language they continue to use made sense. How long before the language itself has to be scrapped? This is Beckett on crystal meth, a road version of End Game, as stripped down and metafictional, but without the gallows humor. And I think we can all agree that it's an odd choice for Oprah, especially given what I take to be the utter darkness of its final pages. After the father's death (and the sudden shift in narrative point of view), who can honestly read the boy's miraculous deliverance into the arms of the "good guys" as anything but what the novel has been preparing us for from its first page—an acquiescence, however merciful, a melting into the father's dying dream? Sorry to burst any bubbles, Oprah, but I know Cormac—this is the author of Blood Meridian and Child of God, after all—and he is one dark dude.
-Pete Duval

Pensacola, Florida
My favorite location for American fiction is Pensacola, Florida, home of the television show Pensacola: Wings of Gold.

But this raises an interesting question about a location for "American" fiction. Often times undergraduate students latch on to travelogues because they and their bloated parents visited Italy or Rio de Janiero or Hong Kong at some point in their collective meaningless family history. For others, it's the opposite. They suck from the teat of travelogue because they haven't been anywhere beyond King of Prussia, Bethesda, or the North Shore.

Forgive me for going all Beach Boys on you guys here, but I'm going to break it down geographically. Well, East Coast novels are hip, because they've got New York, the center of all culture that sucks, and Philadelphia, for David McCullogh. And the southern novels really knock me out when the slow boy in town sees miscegenation happen or the only smart man in town shoots a rabid dog. The Midwest is so bleak and dark because it snows 10 months a year. And California sucks too, unless it's about a coolie uprising or Zorro.

I know I'm ducking the question in my typical style, and that's for good reason. The places I like to read novels about aren't places you read novels about. This probably started when I picked up the Chocolate War, and found Worcester to be a good location for a novel. But anyone who writes about Worcester is ripping off Cormier as much as people who write about Southwestern England are ripping off Hardy. I'm looking at you, grocery store counter novels.

And then I return to my own private obsession (about as private as a stripper's pasties) with humanity's self-destructive urges. There's a lot of bad apocalyptic fiction out there. Case in point, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, which foolishly thinks that you can build a commune that will work as radiation slowly eats away at the inner lining of your intestines until you bleed out and die. It's right-wing absurdist garbage. The kind of fairy-tale that conservatives console themselves with if John Galt can't make the bad socialists go away.

Then you look at something like Cormac McCarthy's The Road with its hopelessly bleak message, or the cyclical Catholicism of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Even more mass-market items like Stephen King's Dark Tower saga have a hand in humanity's own self destruction.

The apocalypse can really only happen in America. Even "after the end" novels like Max Brooks' World War Z that take an international perspective always return to America. The wasteland is what we've inherited from Oppenheimer and Truman, and our own bloated sense of self-importance. Now, to account for everything not covered by this blanket statement: The Road Warrior, The more apocalyptic chapters of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, Threads, and The War Game.

And one tiny bit of hope I have is that the President's recent work at the United Nations will forever relegate this American wasteland to the realm of fiction. With hard work, vigilance, and trust in our partners globally, it's possible that I won't leave the wasteland to my children.
-James R. Van Houtte

Rowan Oak: Oxford, Mississippi
I read somewhere once--I'm almost certain--that Faulkner never could have written Absalom, Absalom! had Rowan Oak had air conditioning. Quentin sits in Miss Coldfield's shuttered room, dusty light slatted through the blinds, and sweats, and as he does we smell the slow decomposition of his waxy celluloid collar as it begins to bend, watch a single pearl of perspiration track the dust of Miss Coldfield's face. In fact, everything and everyone in Yoknapatawpha County sweats. They sweat and breathe so intensely we can fairly smell their disintegration, the billion acts of purification that, given enough time, will undo us all. Everything is dying in Yoknapatawpha County, and everything is being reborn--trumpet lilies, horses, entire families. My copies of Faulkner's book are old. Musty and foxed, they remind me of the cool metallic dirt found in the crawlspace under a home. They smell like time.
-Mark Powell

New Orleans
Ideally, a novel's setting should provide it with enough local flavor to permeate all levels of the work's particular atmosphere. My favorite example of this is the city of New Orleans, as portrayed in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Throughout the work, we meet characters so acutely detailed and specified to their environment that it ensures that the book couldn't possibly be set anywhere else.

Take the character of Burma Jones, a black janitor at the decrepit Night of Joy nightclub. He is paid poorly by the club's owner Lana Lee, who threatens to have him arrested for vagrancy if he causes problems for her. Jones' dilemma, one not atypical of southern blacks during the Jim Crow era, is rendered more fascinating by the calm and cautious way we see Jones interact with his coworkers and boss as he engineers his escape through his cunning and street smarts.

There are many other fine examples, from flamboyant hedonist Dorian Greene, elderly Claude Robichaux and his seething contempt for anything that suggests the handiwork of "Communiss," to the bawdy matron Santa Battaglia.

In addition to its unique and natural cast, Dunces is also lovingly rendered in the large and small details of its city. The French Quarter of Dunces includes both the upscale decadence of Dorian’s estate and the sleazy murk of the Night of Joy.
-Mike Gormly

The Great Plains
When I was ten, my parents tossed my brother and me into the back of our old family Suburban and drove us up to Lake Itasca. My parents wanted to give us the opportunity to “walk across” the Mississippi River while we were still young enough to appreciate the cornball sentimentality. The mouth of the Mississippi River is narrow and calm enough that you can strip off your sandals and wade, or hop rather, across the aesthetic boulders placed in the stream by the CCC back in the 1930s.  

Lake Itasca was only one of an untold number of family trips. With the pop up trailer in tow and the family cat getting motion sick in the back seat, we spent a good portion of each summer driving across the American continent. We saw the classics. Yosemite, Sedona, the Everglades. And we saw the not so classics, the strange roadside towns whose names I can’t seem to dredge up from decade-old memories.

Strangely though, my favorite place was not so much a given location but the in-between landscape of the Great Plains. Because my home state rested just on the outskirts of prairie land, any family trip necessarily began with hours of rolling, swaying prairie grass. It was a veritable sea, the first my landlocked, Midwestern self ever laid eyes on. It weaves and ducks in the wind and the air currents coming off the highway. When it moves you catch subtle flashes of color, reds and yellows and lavender. And the sky is just one vast and striking blue expanse hanging over it all. It’s the sort of backdrop that brings to mind that “timeless” quality from the beloved Timeless American Tale genre of American fiction.
-Jocelyn Rousey