David Heddendorf lives in Ames, Iowa. His essays on literary and religious topics have appeared in various magazines. He is also the author of a short novel, The Wrestler.
We might not use the word “genius” in all these contexts, but the mystery is the same. Where did this exceptional ability come from? Is it just another trait like brown eyes or curly hair? We know only that this aptitude defies our disciplines and formulas and couldn’t have been foreseen. Bestowed upon otherwise ordinary people, genius singles them out in one salient regard. It’s a gift that the wise don’t take for granted, a revelation that might beckon each time we visit a gallery, see a movie, attend a concert, open a book.
Here are three novels about three places in the world. Each conveys not just a perfunctory setting but a web of topography, livelihoods, pastimes, and lore. And in each the experience of arriving at that place endures in memory and self-understanding.
"In order to implement vital system updates, you must install the Trans-Mog-Z Facilitator, available at any Big Horizon Automotive Intervention Center. This has been your first notice.”
"With her glamorous personal life and occasionally edgy prose, Simpson hardly fits the mold of the down-home writer who nurtures a sense of place. Yet..."
In “The Dreams of Mrs. Flintwinch thicken,” a short chapter of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), the kind-hearted Arthur Clennam visits his childhood home....
If you watch a regional sportscast on TV, or some similar out-of-the-way cable fare, you’ll eventually see a commercial featuring a smiling, chubby man...
In Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain, a minister’s daughter decides after her father’s death to remain on their western North Carolina farm, rather...
Two years ago I witnessed the abrupt transformation of an old and distinguished literary magazine. For the people doing the transforming, of course, the...
