Getting to the Heart Of America's Heartland:

The teenage girl in a photograph in the middle of Townships, a new compilation of essays by midwestern authors, smiles. She sits with legs crossed in front of a restaurant window with the words "Fresh Catfish or T-bone--2 for $8" written on it in soap.

This picture was a startling contrast for me, an easterner, viewed against my own image of the Midwest. I am used to my own vague and inaccurate portrait, which includes scenery--lots of flat, eternal scenery--and people who are all under ten or over sixty. Curiously, I imagine them all in black and white.

Most of the photography in Townships doesn't contradict my picture. There are eleven photographs of people who look over retirement age; kids, who fit into my hazy, Hollywood-wrought vision; plain white Indiana farm houses and general stores with old "Drink Coca-Cola" signs. The pictures show 35-cent vanilla ice cream, and movie seats that cost one dollar--at all times. All the photographs are in black and white.

But there is also this girl and a man who has yet to see forty, drinking a cup of coffee, and two young men working at the movie house as well. These photographs surprise me. I expected only the wrinkled, leathery man in overalls, smiling a soft, heartland smile, or the heavy boy wearing a plain white T-shirt and think black sideburns, who perhaps works in his family's grocery store.

The essays in Townships, however, destroyed my stereotype. It contains essays by Jewish writers and by a man of Lebanese descent. I didn't have them in my picture. More importantly, all the essays are bound by the intensely personal and individual nature of their voices, and they emphasize a varied personality and individuality in the Midwest that I never imagined.

The Midwest is carved up into six mile square townships--a rigid form imposed on the land. Michael Martone, the editor of the collection, describes the Midwest as a quilt of these squares. In some parts the colors bleed, unwilling to submit to these lifeless, arbitrary lines; in others, the unnatural has become natural, and the imposed forms lend meaning to life.

Many of the essays reflect on how a place can form its people. The range of topics, perspectives and emotions, however, is wide, but Townships adeptly integrates twenty-five disparate essays. Perhaps that is the point: the Midwest, so unnaturally structured, can defy an easterner's generalizations.

Susan Dodd and Verlyn Klinkenborg, who both teach writing at Harvard, contribute effective pieces to Townships. Both writers ask a similar question in their essays, Dodd in her first sentence and Klinkenborg in his last: what is this place where I was?

In "Rummage," Dodd describes places she has lived and how they have affected her. The seven short sections of her essay spotlight moments from her life, ranging from a childhood Halloween to her college years. Her fractured chronology coupled with her original imagery is powerful and energetic and leaves the reader with vivid impressions of her life.

Klinkenborg's continuous narrative in "Townline" is an adult reflection on his small-town childhood. Klinkenborg's power lies partly in the softness of his voice, and partly in the unpretentious truth of his images.

Both pieces are poignant because, as Dodd suggests, writers do not keep their buttons fastened against the chill.

The writers in Townships open up onto the page, and the Midwest springs up in varied, effective, living forms. The striking photographs, in Townships complement these essays and succeed in portraying the Midwest through its individuals and individuality.