English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Midwestern Magic

Kellie Wells. Skin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 243 pages. $27.95.

Terese Svoboda. Tin God. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 179 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Widmaier Capo, Illinois College

            The “flyover” heartland of America was once known for wheat, corn, sorghum, and other wholesome agricultural products. But a recent notable export from the Midwest is the University of Nebraska Presses’ Flyover Fiction series, edited by Ron Hansen. Two recent series offerings, Skin by Kellie Wells and Tin God by Terese Svoboda, serve up a homegrown helping of magical realism Midwestern style.

             Reading Kellie Wells’ Skin feels like being inside a magical world. Beautiful, quasi-poetic language weaves a spell from the opening line: “The air in What Cheer, Kansas, is gardenia scented year-round, even in the chill, white anonymity of winter, a perfume so heady and redolent it sets noses to twitching and muddles the thinking, throws the clock of expectations plum off its tock, prompts folks to marry in December, die in June, fills them to their gasping gills with a barren hunger no fecundity can ever answer” (1). The novel rewards close reading, stacking images and allusions in a rich tapestry. This sense of entering into a magical world is compounded by the plot, or perhaps the lack of a linear plot that privileges certain characters. The story builds from the intertwined lives of a diverse cast of characters who we meet sometimes from a first-person narrative perspective, sometimes from a third-person perspective. We get smart 15-year-old Ivy Engel fretting over her friend Duncan’s odd skin disease and their first kiss; her elderly neighbor who sees ghosts and believes she has killed her husband; Rachel Loomis, a masseuse who sees angels and tries to come to terms with her abusive father; and other equally fascinating characters. Can Zero really levitate? Was Martin’s dad abducted by aliens for his skin? Everything is slightly larger-than-life, blurring reality and fantasy and inviting readers to suspend disbelief and enjoy the read/ride. 

            Skin can barely contain the energy pulsing through Wells’ language. Angels and aliens, love and dreams, fathers and friendships, photographs and water are recurring motifs weaving these characters together. This is a world so “angel-fraught” that “sporadic seers,” aliens, angels, ghosts and talking cows become as real to readers as they are to the characters (25, 46). “Life in What Cheer’s pseudo-‘burbs grows increasingly surreal with each fiscal year,” the astute Ivy remarks, and nowhere is this more apparent than in one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, Ansel Dorsett’s “Sermon on the Prairie” to a congregation of prairie dogs—“Oh, brethren, fur-bearing friends of the flatlands, we are all the same on the inside, just a heart beating, a soul writhing” (144, 146). Or, as the saying goes, we are all the same beneath the skin. The overarching metaphor of skin seeks to contain the many strands of the novel. From Duncan’s scarred skin to “extraterrestrial skin, drooping from their bones like melting wax” (111), from washing to massaging to beating, skin is a living organ that connects us to our world and which our spirits will finally exceed.  These lyrical chapters fit loosely together, and it is easy to see how several chapters could have been previously published in literary journals. The novel ends without a sense of being fully finished, which while perhaps appropriate to such a fluid and mystical novel still feels somehow unsatisfying. But Skin is an enchanting debut novel for Wells, an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the prize-winning short fiction collection Compression Scars (2002).

             Tin God begins with an old ingredient delivered in an original way: “Hi, this is God—G-O-D, God with all the big letters. And I’m out here in the middle of a field. Oh, yeah, I’m everywhere, duh” (1). The first-person narrative voice, God’s, is a straight-talking Nebraska farm woman, overseeing all as she gives perms, bakes, sows her seeds and offers humorous insight into mankind’s dilemma.  The narrative voice is unexpected and fresh: you have to love a god who cracks “This is God, G-O-D. Add a W more and I’m broadcasting on the radio” and “They always name Me something short, like a pet that needs to be called a lot. Spot! Spot!” (2, 6). The novel’s plot follows two interconnected tales/trails, that of a Spanish conquistador who has lost his way in the tall grass of the plains and that of his possible descendents four hundred years later, a laconic farmer named Jim and his go-go dancer friend Pork, searching the same field the conquistador died in for their own treasure, a bag of drugs tossed out the car window. The titular Tin God is this lost conquistador in his ill-fitting metal armor, haunted by thirst and the natives’ whispers as they trail him through the tall grass.

             The boundary between these periods, these people, these lost treasures is permeable and fluid. The novel’s foray into the magical occurs both through a plot that borders at times on the absurd (as when Pork and Jim steal the cop’s trained search dog to help them find their drugs) and a supporting style that is humorous yet haunting.  The novel touches on some pretty profound themes (loss/lost, colonialism/violence, friendship/family, crime/cons) but avoids preaching. Or, rather, even when God is preaching it reads as though you are eavesdropping on someone’s late-night philosophizing (“To be lost is modern…. To be lost requires a place that is out of this world” (55)). The novel takes on a fabulist, poetic quality not necessarily through its language but through its construction. Shifts between the plot lines can be disorienting, especially in passages where the conquistador is stalked through the endless grasses by the nameless natives and God’s incarnate minion, Tall Pigeon Eye. If this novel contains a flaw, it is the slight imbalance between the clarity and interest of the two story lines.  Tin God is an original and challenging novel from Svoboda, the author of eight previous books of prose and poetry, including Trailer Girl and Other Stories.