Curtis White — Metaphysics in the Midwest [1988]

Anti-mainstream, anti-middlebrow, anti-corporate culture critic Curtis White, author of The Middle Mind and The Science Delusion, continues to entertain in his non-fiction with contrarian and iconoclastic views. Before becoming a culture critic, White was a practitioner of rumbustious comedic fictions leaping over the boundaries of historiography and good taste, as evidenced in this second collection of short stories. The stories are set in Illinois, where White was raised and professored, where now he raises and professors, and each mingle local history, cultural references, taboos, and surreal humour with varying degrees of success. The titular story concerns a Professor Feeling, a crazy scholar of metaphysics who each night visits a boy called The Commissioner to talk about baseball. In ‘A Disciplined Life’ an Italian immigrant finds himself locked up prison upon arriving in America, and his wife and chlild housed in the prison warden’s home. In ‘More Crimes Against the People of Illinois’, an office typist attempts to perpetrate a rebellion by baring her breasts in the office, before being arrested for her protestations of office prostitution. ‘Howdy Doody is Dead’ finds a puppet seeking vengeance on his evil double. ‘Critical Theory’ describes a road trip between Horkheimer and Adorno in America after fleeing from the Nazis. White captures the vernacular of the region and sends it up at the same time in bawdy stories like ‘The Order of Virility’ and ‘Malice’. These summaries fail to capture the sort of freewheeling antics at play in White’s often cruel and sexually lurid stories, so take a dip into the White waters. His strongest works are the novels Memories of My Father Watching TV, with the rare boast of a David Foster Wallace blurb, and Requiem, which I consider his masterpiece.

Editions:

Hardcover, Sun & Moon Press, 1988.

Paperback, Sun & Moon Press, 1989.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Anarcho-Hindu, FC2, 1995.

Memories of My Father Watching TV, Dalkey Archive, 1998.

Requiem, Dalkey Archive, 2001.

America’s Magic Mountain, Dalkey Archive, 2004.

Short fiction:

Heretical Songs, FC2, 1981.

Metaphysics in the Midwest, Sun & Moon Press, 1988.

The Idea of Home, Sun & Moon Press, 1993.