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Considerable stir attended the release last year of a
new memoir by Debra Marquart entitled The Horizontal World: Growing
Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. Now the stir has calmed, and we
are left to reflect what this book, and others like it, say to us as people
of the plains.
Marquart teaches creative writing at Iowa State University, but her roots
are in the North Dakota Plains—specifically in a farm near Napoleon.
Like most all the neighbors, her folks were of German-Russian ancestry.
Like most all her girlish friends, Marquart left there as a young woman
and has come back only to visit.
Horizontal World is not written for a prairie audience. It is written
for an expatriate audience. It speaks to others who come from the plains—that
“freemasonry” of prairie youth of which Willa Cather once spoke—and
to people who know them. Marquart sounds familiar themes that resonate
with expatriates. She says she has “benefited from the sense of rootedness
that this place has afforded me as I have cast about, rootless in the
world.” She feels the tug of a “long, sinewy taproot” that
reaches back home. In middle age she finds herself daydreaming of the
“family land” and of “wandering happily through rows of
trees on a sunny fall afternoon.”
This work is not the place to look for informative exposition about the
modern manifestations of German-Russian ancestry or even about the state
of the Great Plains in general. There is a bit of the latter, but it’s
quite conventional—references to Garrison Keillor, the film Fargo,
the Great American Desert, the rectangular survey system, and the phony
controversy over changing the name of North Dakota.
If the work is not about those things, then what is it about? Partly it’s
about artful writing. Some of the critics who wrote blurbs for it got
a little bit too artful. One of them says if you read Horizontal World
you will “learn what the hungry wind feels like on your naked body.”
I wonder what that means. Maybe I should take my clothes off and read
the book again.
Fortunately, Marquart writes more keenly than that. I agree with the guy
in the Des Moines Register who says she “slips poetic effects through
the side of the mouth, as if between chores.” That’s it exactly;
Marquart writes both cleverly and beautifully, a rare combination.
Her writing is, remember, creative work. “I did a tough apprenticeship
in storytelling with my family,” she says, and part of what she learned,
she admits, was to leave some things out and to embellish those left in.
Horizontal World, though, is an honest book, in two ways. First,
it is a rather self-indulgent work, which I think is true to the author,
who I think is true to her generation. The self-absorption is more striking
on second reading, once you have become accustomed to the artful writing.
Second, the book deals with at least one fact of life on the plains that
we still have trouble facing: children of the prairies go away, the daughters
more so than the sons. Farmers’ daughters, writes Marquart, “must
struggle against the powerful apostrophes of their fathers”—their
possessiveness, that is. “They must drive away some early spring
morning, hands planted firmly on the wheel, convinced they will never
look back.”
This is not to say the prairies are going to be depopulated. It is only
to say they will be abandoned, again and again. The demographics of the
plains are turning around today, but the fact of children fleeing home
will not cease. So leave a light on in the window, and save up your frequent
flyer miles.
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prior permission from Plains Folk.
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