State by State

I am sad to say that State by State is one of the most disappointing books I have read in a long time. It's not that it was bad. It wasn't, per se. It's just that individually and collectively these essays failed to do justice to the America I know.

I love this country. I don't mean that in a chest-beating-flag-waving-patriotic-fervor sort of way. I mean the land - the incomparable experience of cresting a hill in northern New Mexico at sunset, or hiking the California Coastal trail on a cloudless fall day, or the sweet and sticky taste of homemade pecan pie in the Deep South. These are things I love about America, and by-and-large they were completely and utterly absent.

The Arkansas essay, for example, was about bumper stickers. From 1991. This tells me nothing about the state, which is doubly disappointing as it's one of the few states I haven't ever visited. Oregon and Vermont consisted of comic strips, the font too small to read on my Nook, even if I'd cared to. (I didn't - I was interested in essays, not art.) Many of the actual essays consisted of an author's trip down memory lane, typically back to the 1960s or 1970s. That would be fine, had I wanted to know what the state was like 40 years ago. State by State is not a memoir, though, or at least it shouldn't be. A few of the essays do capture the essence of the state - the North Carolina essay on the proper way to eat barbecue springs to mind. Illinois was excellent.

It is as though nearly all of the authors were thinking what William T. Vollman actually penned in his "California" opening: "...mass culture, with its big box warehouses of the landscape, language, and mind itself, has already destroyed so many differences between states that there is less to say..." In some ways, this is inarguably true. But in so many other ways, this attitude gives short shrift to the entire idea, which was to, essentially, update the 1930s WPA guides. Reading Sir Edward Robert Sullivan's Rambles and Scrambles in North and South America, particularly the North American rambles, is more pleasurable, more educational, and in many ways more accurate and telling, even 150+ years later.