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Season of Water and Ice
About a year and a half ago, Northern Illinois University Press launched a new imprint, Switchgrass Books, publishing literary fiction written in the Midwest. It’s the kind of charge that’s both specific and vague: It focuses on a region, but what makes the Midwest distinct as a region?
Lystra’s debut novel plays with the rural versus urban tension of the central states by rooting his story in 1957. The narrator, Danny, is 14 and living with his father in a cabin in rural Michigan. Enamored with a storybook life of outdoor living and selling-by-handshake, his dad quit his job at the General Motors factory in Grand Rapids to immerse himself in a simpler, freer life. Danny’s mom can take only so much of the sudden downgrade in lifestyle, flees to tony Oak Park, Illinois, and phones regularly to tell Danny about the creature comforts of the ’burbs and Chicago. Danny is completely unmoored, now struggling to make friends at school, and enchanted by Amber, his slightly older neighbor who’s been held out of school. Amber is “with child”—her preferred term—and her boyfriend has fled to the army. His return, and Danny’s mother’s refusal to do the same, provide the jaws of the vise Danny finds himself in.
Manhood—between Danny’s itinerant father and Amber’s abusive boyfriend—appears in all the wrong shapes for Danny, who can’t quite make out what it should look like. And though those notions are now 50 years old, there’s a transcendency common to all good coming-of-age novels. Danny’s itching to define himself, and it’s actually the morphing Midwest—where industry and country abut—that provides the greatest metaphor.
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