Obviously I'm sensitive to this subject as well. I get really annoyed constantly seeing movies and books set in NYC or LA, with the occasional one set in SF, Chicago or...or...heck, it's been like two decades since we've seen something come out of Pittsburgh (Chabon). The opposite side of this are the Southern books, where we get the endless faxes of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Midwest has a rich literary history, but not a grand present day representation, from what I've come across. In fact, I'd say the idea of place in fiction has taken a backseat to plot and character, which is why we get a lot of stories that seem to take place in no place in particular. This is troubling to me because I think the plots of stories and the characters in stories are, to a great extent, determined by place.
With the railroads, you can blame air and automotive lobbyists--they killed the rails largely, to cut out competition and force the automobile per individual culture and created the flyover country that we live in now. And along with the political maneuverings over which kind of transportation would be given the most political sanctions, the unleashing of the corporate world to basically go to third world countries and abuse people who were used to an even worse life than the working classes of America who were getting uppity and demanding fair wages and work regulations and had begun to organize into powerful unions, you get the poverty-laden landscape of the Midwest today. I haven't laughed so bitterly as I have all this past year as I've met more and more people who seem to have heard about the decline of the Midwest for the first time in their life as it hit the media again during the democratic nomination period. Apparently, many people on the coasts seem to have thought that everyone was middle class and worked white collar jobs and had everything a person basically needs to do well and had all the same opportunities as anyone else in the country. I'm sure they've forgotten about it already again. Economic problems bore people who don't have them, usually.
In any case, I think it's interesting when people react to midwesternness in fiction--I came across that sometimes with my book when it came out too--and I think that the incomprehension of and almost exoticized response to that landscape and its people and their problems and habits and manners is indicative of a huge blind spot in the landscape of fiction as well.
What I dislike more than anything is when people think stories based in locales like Madison (or, in my case, a nameless small rural town on the outskirts of a dead steel town in Ohio that people largely forgot about even though the Boss tried to memorialize it) are quaint. Quaint is a typical response to the midwest. I think there are certainly aspects that are quaint, but there are other aspects of it as well.
In any case, it sucks when you see people talking badly about something you've spent a lot of time and energy in making, and made as best you could at the time. It feels like poison in the well when you come across stuff like that. Best to shrug it off and walk away, unless something they've said actually resonates. I find that it rarely does, though.
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With the railroads, you can blame air and automotive lobbyists--they killed the rails largely, to cut out competition and force the automobile per individual culture and created the flyover country that we live in now. And along with the political maneuverings over which kind of transportation would be given the most political sanctions, the unleashing of the corporate world to basically go to third world countries and abuse people who were used to an even worse life than the working classes of America who were getting uppity and demanding fair wages and work regulations and had begun to organize into powerful unions, you get the poverty-laden landscape of the Midwest today. I haven't laughed so bitterly as I have all this past year as I've met more and more people who seem to have heard about the decline of the Midwest for the first time in their life as it hit the media again during the democratic nomination period. Apparently, many people on the coasts seem to have thought that everyone was middle class and worked white collar jobs and had everything a person basically needs to do well and had all the same opportunities as anyone else in the country. I'm sure they've forgotten about it already again. Economic problems bore people who don't have them, usually.
In any case, I think it's interesting when people react to midwesternness in fiction--I came across that sometimes with my book when it came out too--and I think that the incomprehension of and almost exoticized response to that landscape and its people and their problems and habits and manners is indicative of a huge blind spot in the landscape of fiction as well.
What I dislike more than anything is when people think stories based in locales like Madison (or, in my case, a nameless small rural town on the outskirts of a dead steel town in Ohio that people largely forgot about even though the Boss tried to memorialize it) are quaint. Quaint is a typical response to the midwest. I think there are certainly aspects that are quaint, but there are other aspects of it as well.
In any case, it sucks when you see people talking badly about something you've spent a lot of time and energy in making, and made as best you could at the time. It feels like poison in the well when you come across stuff like that. Best to shrug it off and walk away, unless something they've said actually resonates. I find that it rarely does, though.