Kansas City News Blog

​National Book Award-winning writer and literary fussbudget Jonathan Franzen, who looked a $1.5 million gift horse in the mouth by dissing Oprah Winfrey in 2001 when she picked his novel The Corrections for her book club, has now helpfully outlined the geographic and emotional boundaries of the Midwest.

In an interview printed in the summer issue of Duke University's literary journal, Boundary 2, Franzen, who grew up in St. Louis suburb Webster Groves, explains:

If you ask what the Midwest means to me, it's that myth of an innocence prolonged and then abruptly lost. ... And somehow this dynamic seems more like a Midwestern thing than a Lower East Side thing or a South Boston thing. I'm not enough of a social historian to have a good theory of why exactly this is true. I do know that, for a long time, you really were isolated in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, or Webster Groves, Missouri, or Oak Park, Illinois -- it really was a long way from the Lower East Side. This is all rapidly changing with our new technologies, and our homogenized exurbs and suburbs, but some of the social and mental habits that grew out of isolation may persist in succeeding generations, leaving vestiges of a "Midwestern" character ...

[On what counts as the Midwest:] Indiana is a special case. Evansville is the South. Fort Wayne is still Rust Belt, Valparaiso is definitely Midwest. That's actually an interesting way to approach it--to define where my boundaries of the Midwest run. I think it begins around Columbus, Ohio -- Thurberville -- and stretches west. Anything below I-70 is basically southern. And that's true right across Missouri. My Midwest is bounded on the south by I-70. It stretches all the way to about an hour east of Denver and includes pretty much all of the Great Plains states north of I-70. ... You can take all of Kansas, some of Oklahoma, too. But not, for example, downstate Illinois. You start hearing the South in people's voices. They don't sound like Tom Brokaw anymore.

Hold up a minute. All of Kansas is the Midwest, but in Missouri the Midwest exists north of Interstate 70 but not south of it? That's pretty confusing. Lower East Side, here I come.

Hat tip to Andrew Seal's excellent site Blographia Literaria for the heads up and for the laugh. Seal writes, after quoting Franzen at length: "Also, as someone who grew up right on I-70, I think his cartography's kind of bullshit."