In this beguiling study of meteorology and its discontents, Svenvold, a poet and author of Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw
, spends the month of May in the colorful caravan of tornado chasers as they pore over weather data in strip-mall parking lots, drive thousands of miles through the Oklahoma-Nebraska corridor searching for thunderheads and agonize over which of the many storm clouds darkening the horizon to pursue. It's a classic American mixture of high-tech fetishism and barnstorming entertainment, populated by sober meteorologists with the latest forecasting gadgetry and jargon, an IMAX filmmaker hoping to drive his tanklike "Tornado Intercept Vehicle" into the whirlwind and local weathercasters who stage each tornado watch as a "low-tech reality show the size of central Kansas." The author situates it in the cult of "catastrophilia," a "commodified version of the... sublime" visible in everything from "torn porn" videos to the Weather Channel's marketing of weather as consumer accouterment. Svenvold's usually engaging chronicle of "extreme waiting" for funnel clouds occasionally lapses into extreme writing ("Here was the anti-storm, weather as non-weather," he broods during an unwelcome bout of clear skies), and his impulse to suck up all information in his path sometimes leads to digressions. But his wry, supple prose vividly captures a heartland made up of the awe-inspiring and the absurd. Agent, Sarah Chalfant
. (May)
