The Books of the States: Colorado (9 electoral votes; Guest: Benjamin Kunkel)

Well before Benjamin Kunkel's first novel, Indecision, made him "New York's latest literary sensation" (and immediately ironized as such) a few years ago, and before the literary journal he cofounded, n+1, became one of the most talked about of our day (ditto on the irony), his name had already stuck to my byline flypaper as a critic I wanted to read again. I don't even remember what reviews of his made me think that (only bylines, not subjects, stick to the flypaper apparently), but I still jump ahead to a piece of his when I see it in a table of contents. Despite his still-young age (well, younger than me), he seems to have read everything (at least everything on the Susan Sontag syllabus), and he writes about the heaviest of hitters with the sort of aphoristic authority that few writers of any age have the confidence--or the chops--to pull off. Read him on Robert Walser in The New Yorker, or Pessoa in The Believer, or Lawrence in The New York Review of Books (they'll only show you the opening paragraph unless you're a subscriber, but it's a sharp one: "D.H. Lawrence is often thought of as a novelist of sex when really his great subject was marriage. We tend to forget that Lady Chatterley's lover was also her second-husband-to-be. Yet marriage was Lawrence's religion as sex was merely his sacrament."). Or on Sontag herself in n+1 (which I swear I hadn't seen when I made the Sontag remark a couple of sentences ago!). And if this smart, unsigned piece on Bolano and Sebald in the current n+1 isn't by him, I'll eat my hat.

Kunkel grew up as the child of '70s back-to-the-landers near the small mountain town of Eagle, Colorado, and in his piece for State by State he writes of its natural gifts with little of the post-ironic throat-clearing that he and his generation are, justifiably or not, so identified with:

The first of the beautiful ordinary things I remember are the creek gabbling away in its bed and the smell of rained-on sage bringing out an unsuspected sweetness from the land: thoughts of water in a dry place. But the thinness and dryness of the air on clear days--as of something brittle that would never break--was also thrilling, and what I liked doing on days like that was to clamber up the red mountain, which always offered some new place to be discovered among its troughs of brilliant dirt and tilted spines.

Elsewhere in the piece he cites Jean Stafford as "probably the best writer Colorado has so far produced," and she's notable on the list below as the only writer who, as Kunkel says, "stays put" in Colorado. The rest of the list is a collection of Colorado scenes rather than entire books: "Colorado," he writes, "has played more of a supporting than starring role in American literature." But it does seem to be the epicenter for apocalyptic cultural confrontation: The Stand, Atlas Shrugged, The Man in the High Castle (not to mention the nonfiction conflicts in Big Trouble and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee). Maybe the Continental Divide running through the heart of the state makes it the natural territory for the final battle.

Here are his nine nominations:

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown contains chapters on the appallingly similar fates of many of the Indian tribes west of the 100th meridian. Still, some of the book's most unforgettable pages concern the cynical campaigns against the Utes of western Colorado and the Cheyenne of the high plains.
• Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas: It used to be when they said "class warfare" they meant it. Lukas's superb account of the conflict between labor and capital in the mountain west around the turn of the last century is--to be honest--mostly about Idaho. But the panorama also takes in Leadville, Colorado, at the time a source of tremendous mineral wealth and considerable violence.
• The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford: Jean Stafford wrote more beautifully about Colorado than anyone else, and The Mountain Lion is her most sustained portrait of the state. There's a breathless exactness to the descriptions that any writer would envy, and any Coloradan will recognize. Also, unlike most writers who deal with Colorado, Stafford, in this short novel, stays put. She doesn't roam into other states. She doesn't glance; she stares.
• The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick: Dick's counterfactual novel is set in a post-WWII American divided between the victorious Axis powers. Colorado serves as buffer between the Japanese and the German zones, and is where Julia Frink teaches judo and becomes obsessed with The Grasshopper Lies Heavy--a counterfactual novel in which the Allies won the war. It's the usual Dickian head-trip, but with mountains.
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: This sluggish libertarian potboiler counts as a classic by measure of the influence its ideas have exercised on wide-eyed teenagers and Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Rand's supermen, who give the workers of the world a taste of their own medicine by going on strike, hole up in a mountain retreat called Galt's Gulch and based on Ouray, Colorado.
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac: A surprising amount of the time not spent behind the wheel unspools in Denver, home town of Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in the book). The character based on Allen Ginsberg, Carlo Marx, writes a poem called "The Denver Doldrums." I want to read that poem every time I get stuck in the snowed-in Denver International Airport.
• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper: Did you know that the best indie rock album of the 90's, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, was recorded in Denver?
• American Purgatorio by John Haskell: One of the weirdest, funniest, and most touching scenes in this weird, funny, and touching road-trip novel involves LSD, very passive sex, and Boulder, Colorado.
• The Stand by Stephen King: You can also go to Boulder for end of the world. In fact, it's in the Boulder Free Zone that the final battle between good and evil takes place. Meanwhile, Colorado has played more of a supporting than starring role in American literature. Maybe that will change before the crack of doom.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Comments

[Amanda on December 08, 2008 at 07:48 AM]

A Colorado list without any books by Connie Willis? Sure, she writes genre (science fiction) but has numerous awards, and her elegant and humorous book Bellwether is set in Colorado.