Reading American cities: books about Minneapolis–St Paul

The twin cities of the midwest have a compelling and distinctive literature. Kathryn Savage runs us through the books that will transport you to this rich landscape of contrasts, from F Scott Fitzgerald to Louise Erdrich

Looking back on St Paul, F Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick Carraway remembers “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadow of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow”. The twin cities may function in The Great Gatsby as little more than a refuge from east coast excess, but according to Susan Choi the novel is a “weird book, so much stranger than its reputation” anyway – a description that could apply equally well to its literature, which is compelling, unusual, far stranger than its reputation.

Take Charles Baxter’s short story Kiss Away. Jodie loves the cipher, Glaze, who has “an air of scruffy unseriousness” about him. The two fall in love. Baxter is expert at subtext and he pens an illuminating account of the technique in The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. The ease of Glaze’s demeanour and “the cottony hazy heat” of the Minneapolis summer feed Jodie’s contentment. Then comes the late-night phone call from Glaze’s ex who tells Jodie to beware of him. He’s abusive. “He broke two of my ribs. I had a shoulder separation from him. He got very practiced in the ways of apology and remorse. He has a genius for remorse.” Tension in Baxter’s work is subterranean, repressed. Garrison Keillor has long mined midwestern self-effacement for humour. In Baxter’s midwest, such manners are a thin veil over passionate and self-destructive desires which illuminate, forcefully, all the characters seek to mask. In his 1997 Atlantic Monthly interview, Baxter says, “I think most fiction is about desire. So one of the interesting features about violence is that it’s the meeting point of desire and destruction. It takes you to that boundary where respectability ends and darkness starts to fall, as desire gets out of hand.”

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