Prairie Dust
‘Wichita,’ a Novel by Thad Ziolkowski
By NATALIE BAKOPOULOS
Published: May 18, 2012
Near the end of “Wichita,” Thad Ziolkowski’s first novel, the protagonist recalls a line from Rilke: “You are not surprised at the force of the storm — you have seen it growing.” It’s a passing reference; the character, Lewis, neither dwells on the line nor mentions the poem it comes from, “Onto a Vast Plain.” But Ziolkowski is an accomplished poet, and it’s not hard to see Rilke’s great poem about grief as the secret heart beating through this charming, smart and devastating book.
WICHITA
By Thad Ziolkowski
253 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $16.
The novel begins with Lewis’s return to his mother’s home in Wichita, Kan., from New York, where he has just graduated from Columbia. His pompous professor father, Virgil, expects him to attend graduate school, though Lewis is unsure of his next step. His girlfriend has left him, and his divorced, eccentric mother, Abby — who invests in one “multilevel marketing” scheme after another — has “half-facetiously” suggested he return to “the healing powers of the Great Plains,” where she has begun a storm-chasing business.
Lewis is not the only one returning home. His younger brother, Seth, is supposed to be away at an “art school/spa for the wealthy,” working as a groundskeeper and modeling for drawing classes. But when Lewis and Abby pull into the driveway, Seth is there, “waving his arms in the middle of the street as if flagging down a car on a country road.” On Seth’s collarbone is “a swath of new-tattoo bandage, which glows faintly in the dusk.” His presence is electric.
Seth is a storm of his own: complex, maddening and finely wrought. You want to wring his neck while you embrace him. He is heartbreakingly bipolar, he does a lot of meth, and no matter how strung out or volatile he becomes, the most unlikely individuals glance his way for approval. Even self-absorbed Virgil becomes self-aware when Seth is involved.
In “Wichita,” the wise are ludicrous and the ludicrous wise — but never in such an obvious 180-degree flip. The novel resists common assumptions about the Midwest and the East Coast, or, specifically, the two Americas. Yes, Lewis’s beard “seems to have lost its quotation marks in transit: he looks like a laid-off lumberjack.” But Abby is no red-state matron, what with her Ponzi schemes and her two boyfriends (one in the house and one in a tent in the backyard). Regarding both Seth and his mother, Lewis is less surprised than simply inured, though when he finally sees what Seth has tattooed onto his collarbone, he is powerfully shaken.
Ziolkowski allows his characters a full range of emotional complexity. Lewis’s mother likes to quote Whitman: “Do I contradict myself?” She drives a Cadillac Escalade, which if we’re generalizing seems more in line with Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes. Yet the novel doesn’t completely do away with familiar types, either: “There are more pickup trucks in the driveways than he remembers ever seeing at once, shiny Fords and Dodges, red or black. Bass boats under tarpaulins, trailers with plywood siding. The tone is no-nonsense, stowed and lashed down, like military housing.” The surroundings of Lewis’s neighborhood feel typical even if his quirky family and those who surround them never do.
The characters remain recognizable, though, which helps reinforce Ziolkowski’s mood of gentle satire. Lewis’s ex-girlfriend is as perplexed as Virgil by his decision to abandon the academy. “What did Lewis propose to do,” she asks, “work?” Virgil might come off as the archetypal medievalist professor sequestered with his papers, but his conservative ideas about proper social behavior make him less absent-minded than stuffy. Comically bent out of shape by Lewis’s failure to send a thank-you card to his grandfather, Virgil overdramatizes the transgression only to be met with Seth’s (not Lewis’s) equally dramatic reaction.
Social niceties become particularly pointed considering the feelings of Virgil’s family about Seth: He “was clinically insane and, for the sake of everyone’s peace of mind and concentration, should be forgotten about, disowned, disavowed, barred.” Ironic, and troubling, all of it. For all of Virgil’s insistence on grace, his family is the one lacking it. They have exiled Seth, who needs family most, to the ranks of the insignificant.
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