The Flatness and Other Landscapes

Here is an ode to the farming life that is most eloquent when it is most down-to-earth. These essays (previously published in small magazines and anthologies) reflect on the inner and outer territories of the Midwest. What keeps the reader's interest alive is Martone's keen eye for the uncanny details of ordinary life in an agricultural community. His depiction of how the system of vacuum pipes acts in an automatic milking machine (the pipe ""runs around the barn, circles over the stalls like a halo""), his description of the process in which pigs' needle teeth and tail are snipped (so they don't bite each others' tails off when they're crowded into a pen), his account of ""walking the beans"" (weeding the rows of crop beans by walking up and down with a special hoe topped with a wick dipped in an extremely potent herbicide)--all these draw the reader into a world that seems simultaneously familiar and utterly alien. Where Martone (Seeing Eye) falters in passages in which he tries to muse upon the inner lives of ordinary Midwesterners. His attempt, while teaching a course on rural and agricultural literature, to locate the grandeur of agricultural life by linking the Iowa farmer with Odysseus on his return from the Trojan war rings false, and his comparison of Indianapolis to the ancient city of Sparta is equally forced. Most off-putting are the self-conscious passages in which Martone reflects upon his own reflections upon storytelling; here he devolves into a tangential meta-narrative that utterly undoes the spell cast by his more concrete and insightful real-life descriptions. (Jan.)