“Alice Munro saw it all. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never eaten nanaimo bars sitting on the shag carpet at a Grey Cup Party, or carried a pitcher of beer to a table of tipsy grown-ups at a bonspiel, rink rafters thick with cigarette smoke; just as one need not have felt the summer sun fading on a dacha five-days ride from St. Petersburg to metabolize the truths of Chekhov (to whom she is rightly compared) one need not ever have set foot in Canada to understand Munro.
Because she wrote for all of us, everywhere.” –Jonny Diamond
Describing a collage of particular styles, I shouldn’t be surprised that pastiche shares a root with pasta and pastry and paste. There’s nothing in the word that suggests a process. Paste is cruder than pasta, which is comparatively cruder than pastry. A pastiche might be a paste of references mashed together or the flaky layering of stylistic choices, dependent on the audience’s familiarity with the style imitated.
My familiarity with the Midwest is mostly external. I have lived in Indiana for less than a year. By Midwestern standards, that makes me still a tourist. I don’t know how to imitate the deeper sensibilities of this place. A pastiche of southern Indiana might include corn, basketball, tornadoes, cicadas, and politeness. All superficial images, borderline cliche.
Jonny Diamond, writing in Literary Hub about the similarities his mother shared with the late Alice Munro, creates a pastiche of the Canadian Midwest to demonstrate Munro’s independence from such references. Munro’s fiction looks inward. As a writer, I struggle to stop looking outward at my surroundings, at the billboards and forests and empty storefronts and the enormous sky.
The biggest cliche about the Midwest is the supposedly rampant politeness. Kaveh Akbar even describes it in his debut novel Martyr! In one scene, he writes:
“At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along at their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you” (134).
Martyr! is another story that looks inward, to an almost painful degree. It is a character study, layers deep and rich and raw, and though it is neither about Indiana nor Iran, the main character’s presence between both places constitutes many of those layers.
I spent May revising the last dregs of a novel I started writing just shy of ten years ago, shortly after I started this blog. In fact, the first iteration of this novel came to me when I visited Ireland in the summer of 2014. Then, it was a shapeless pastiche of my hometown. Building on feedback from an agent who saw promise in it but declined to represent me, I added layers and layers to the characters. The novel didn’t need more where, but more who and why.
Pastiche is a comfortable place to write from, I think, because it allows me to direct the reader’s attention to something else, a subject outside the text. It replaces layers of interiority with vibe curation, which is certainly enjoyable, the way a good detective story can be. But I also want to practice writing through the layers, rather than skating across a single, flat plane.
Keene Short 