If You Want an Apocalypse, Head to the Great Lakes

Dear Republic,

Scene Week continues with a region that you don’t normally associate with scenes but is, on the other hand, apocalypse-ready.

• ROL

IF YOU WANT AN APOCALYPSE, HEAD TO THE GREAT LAKES

The Great Lakes region is vast, but with the exception of the Chicago metropolitan area, the imprint it has left on American literature is modest. Naturally, one can find some promontories on the literary landscape. One might cite the Cleveland chapters in Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt (a book that H.L. Mencken called “the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn”), and of course Hemingway’s Michigan stories. Last year, Thomas Pynchon made his own contribution with Shadow Ticket, which is largely set in Milwaukee in the 1930s. But despite such high points, it’s fair to say that the literature of our great inner coastal region lacks the fecundity of that of the South, or of California or New England.

Yet in the last decade or so, the Great Lakes have begun to leave a rather uncomfortable imprint on the literary world. Put briefly, this region has become a locus for stories about catastrophe, whether that catastrophe be actual or potential.

From the other side of the border (Toronto), a novel about a pandemic that wipes out over 90% of the world’s population (Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven ) broke through into public consciousness, and gained still more attention after COVID-19 made the author look like a prophet. The book recounts the adventures of a theatrical troupe called the Traveling Symphony, which stages performances of Shakespeare in various locations around the Great Lakes as the depopulated world starts to pick up after the catastrophe. Under the slogan “survival is insufficient,” their aim is to reconstitute what can be saved of civilization.

More recently (2022), Jill Stukenberg’s novel News of the Air told the story of a middle-class couple from Chicago that relocates to rural Wisconsin beca…