Flood Stage and Rising by Jane Varley, and Ordinary Genius by Thomas Fox Averill

Abstract

2 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 Flood Stage and Rising. By Jane Varley. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004- 125 pages, $20.00. Ordinary Qenius. By Thomas Fox Averill. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 148 pages, $22.00. Reviewed by Jennifer Henderson Virginia Tech, Blacksburg John T. Flanagan, editor of the anthology, America Is West (1945), claimed that “the ideal middlewestem writer is either bom in the north central section of the continent and by virtue of environment and education imbued with its spirit, or one who by long residence, especially in his formative years, has become an integral part of the land of his adoption and is particularly fitted to describe its people and voice its point of view” (iv). Here we have two writers — one memoirist, one novelist—who aptly fit these criteria. Jane Varley’s memoir Flood Stage and Rising is a contemplative account of surviving the devastating flood caused by North Dakota’s Red River in 1997. Structured in alternating chapters—the linear chronology of her time in North Dakota and vignettes about rivers important to her life—the book interweaves the two strands almost like a braid. However, instead offorming a closely entwined experience, the story seems to unravel at times, the tension between her desire to belong and her yearning for wildness conflicting in interesting ways. Although Varley is a native Iowan—a Midwesterner in denial ofher identity, she once admitted—her narrative begins with her decision to move from Virginia to Grand Forks to pursue a PhD and traces both the contours of her interest in landscape, especially rivers, and the rugged terrain of doubt: “Something in us, I think, wants to push outward toward the edges, where each step takes the concentration of survival. At thirty years old, when I moved to North Dakota, I wanted the Alaska I imagined since girlhood ... I craved the internal experience of living beyond the end of the road” (20). However, as she discovers throughout the book, this desire comes with inherent danger and sacrifice. Once the flood devastates the town, Varley begins to understand that the dream of “rootlessness,” espoused by some as a western American disease, under­ mines her hopes for losing herself completely in a new geography: “These were people’s homes, people who were sunk in, generationally and culturally, in ways I wasn’t and could understand only as a passerby. I wanted to feel a part, but at the same time I knew I had much less invested in the fight as the town got soaked, its future uncertain” (67). Perhaps this is why her narrative returns to the memory of rivers, especially the Mississippi, where she always feels at home. Aside from the last chapter, in which Varley feels compelled to neatly summarize the themes of the book in a conclusion that explains what she’s already shown, the narrative is insightful and heartfelt. Her story resonates with B o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 5 familiarity: a universal desire to leave home in search of adventure and differ­ ence, followed by an inevitable returning—literally or metaphorically— to the place where one began. She writes, “Questions of place were defining for me. Leaving home at nineteen had been invigorating, but returning to Iowa felt like getting back to who I really was ... Com and soybean fields, red bams, silos and blue Harvestores, highways that met at right angles, and the narrow forests along rivers and creeks. ... I couldn’t clearly see or complexly love my home until I had left it” (85). Thomas Fox Averill’s collection of short stories, Ordinary Genius, presents an alternate view of place: What happens to those who stay put? Largely set in small towns throughout Averill’s native Kansas, inhabited by plainspoken and hardworking people, Ordinary Genius offers a complementary view of the Midwest, one filled with magic and possibility. Averill creates characters that are representative of Middle America—men, women, and children—who experience loss and...