Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. Critics complain that they are exasperating, or impossible, or not worth the time. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Margurite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. They felt less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). The online reader reviews I found varied between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claimed he had given a copy of the 1198-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he wrote. Upon Young’s death in 1995, thirty years after the novel was published, the New York Times proclaimed it “one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.”

I came across Young by way of her essay “The Midwest of Everywhere,” a short piece about a series of bizarre sights she claims to have witnessed first-hand in the American interior: Elephants browsing the banks of the Wabash river; an entire town populated by deaf people; a dead whale in a boxcar, stranded in the middle of a cornfield. Young was born in Indiana and spent many decades in the Midwest—at the University of Chicago, where she studied Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she taught fiction—but in the essay, she writes about the region in a way that is entirely unfamiliar. “For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way,” she writes. “I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing.” I read the essay last winter, at my home in Wisconsin. At the time, I was in a slump that was probably seasonal but felt dire and endless and linked, in a vague way, to the fact that I lived in a region that was bound up in the American imagination, and increasingly my own, with the television reboot of Rosanne. I have always lived in the Midwest, and had often defended it against reductive stereotypes. But the notion that it was an economic and political wilderness had become such an insistent article of national consensus, I’d begun to doubt my own frames of reference.  I was not in a particularly ambitious mood that winter, but I kept thinking about the strange consciousness I’d glimpsed in the essay. A couple days later, I’d found a copy of Miss MacIntosh.  Read More