The Distancers: An American Memoir

One of my favorite memoirs is Edmund Love's The Situation in Flushing, followed closely by his recounting of college days in Hanging On, Or How to Get Through a Depression and Enjoy Life (the title of which refers to an economic breakdown, as opposed to a mental one). I had hoped that Lee Sandlin's The Distancers, which is also about the (nearly) forgotten ways of life in (nearly) forgotten Midwestern farm towns, would be similar. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed.

The fact of the matter is there is too little memory in the memoir for my liking. The Distancers ceases to be a memoir fairly early; it is the history of the Sehnert family from its arrive from Germany in the decades before the Civil War up through the latter decades of the twentieth century. It's not that their story is disinteresting or that there aren't enough quirky characters to engage the reader. There is plenty of interest and not a few true characters. Squished into 180-odd pages, though, The Distancers compresses the generations together, a few years in the life of this one, a few in the life of that one, until it is impossible to remember the grandfather from the great-grandfather from the great-great-grandfather without thumbing back dozens of pages to recall the particulars.

What Sandlin does best is paint a portrait of a way of life long since past. The desire to reach into the past and pull it forward, to bring it to the reader in all its glory (and occasionally, all its grit) is palpable, and in this way The Distancers is quite similar to The Situation in Flushing. Where Sandlin does this best is, rather naturally, in the decades he can personally recall, which is the middle of the twentieth century. Earlier than that, the desire is still there, but the result is fuzzier; he is, after all, stitching together a past that is nearly forgotten. Perhaps if The Distancers had been longer, I would have felt it more complete, or perhaps I am just too picky. While I'm not sorry I read Sandlin's memoir, I still prefer those of Edmund Love.