Little America

by Diane Simmons

Little America is for anyone who has ever considered just getting in the car and driving away. Here the ribbon of Western road is a metaphor for the heart’s strange longings, providing hard, sometimes hilarious, lessons on the improbability of escape, the possibility of salvation, and the elusiveness of self-knowledge.
 

In “Yukon River,” young lovers with a seedy past risk everything to be purified in the Alaska outback; they encounter instead the ruthless opportunism and alluring corruption of oil boom Fairbanks. In “Suitcase,” a modern Heart of Darkness, the road meanders from California down through impoverished Mexico and then sinks into a deadly Guatemalan jungle where the idealism of an earlier era gently rots. “Roll” starts in a truck on a cliff top in Idaho, one wheel off the edge. “Little America” travels with grifters on the lam who choke up at the sight of an Oregon wheat field at sunrise; later, in Wyoming, they are made solemn by the grandeur of the world’s biggest truck stop and pause to Why would anyone willingly stay in one place?

 

With deadpan humor, perfect pitch voice, and keen love of place, Simmons’s stories illuminate the abiding American desire to “light out”—if not necessarily for something better, at least for something new.

 

 

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Diane Simmons' novel Dreams Like Thunder, set on a farm in Eastern Oregon at the end of the Frontier, won the Oregon Book Award. Her short story collection, Little America, about life on the road in the West, won the Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction. Her story, "Yukon River," was runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor's Prize. Short stories have appeared in Fiction Magazine, Northwest Review, Missouri Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Drunken Boat

Reviews

[Deborah Clearman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered Diane Simmons’ story “Yukon River” in a lit mag and was swept away by its quirky characters and its great story-telling voice. “It’s mostly drunk Indians where I’m working at the moment,” the narrator tells us with dry humor. “Better than mostly white guys. Indians just drink.” Then a charismatic ex-con shows up at the bar and invites her to go with him to Alaska. “My first thought was: he’s too good for me. My second thought: I know him from somewhere. My third thought: he looks exactly like the picture of Jesus Grandma used to keep on the piano.” Of course, she goes. And what’s more, I wanted her to go.

LITTLE AMERICA is a fabulous collection of road stories. Its characters are always on the move. They may be on a quest, but they’re often on the run—from the law, or from home, or from the entanglements of love. Narrated in a casual, breezy tone, as if they’re confiding their stories to their best friend, they let slip the current of desperation that runs under their freedom. A great example comes from the story “Roll,” which begins when a Joleen’s husband perches their pickup truck on the edge of a cliff, with both of them in it, in a daredevil stunt. She realizes it’s time to flee the marriage. “He picked me up hitchhiking,” she says. “I know you shouldn’t meet people that way. You should meet people in more of a family setting.” No kidding. But her escape just gets her deeper into trouble.

Simmons moves us through this America with prose as lean and taut as her characters, and perfect pacing. Other reviewers have noted her deft endings, which are as satisfying as they are surprising. Also impressive are her beginnings. Each story opens with a sentence that could have been fired from a gun—“Driving north in a stolen Mustang that is too new and too bright blue”—catapulting us down the highway, but letting us pause every once in a while to notice the slant of light on a wheat field or a mountain.

I come away convinced that we are all drifters and grifters in some way. I don’t live on farm or drive a pickup truck or carry a gun. But rootlessness feels just as true of American life to me here in New York City. We’re people on the move, moving on, looking for opportunity, always hopeful. That’s what these stories capture.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover of Little America (unfortunately not visible on this site) says it all--a long stretch of highway under big sky visible from the front seat of a moving car. The characters in this collection, some of whom turn up more than once, are constantly on the move, and not sure what they're traveling toward or away from. Their roots are few to nonexistent. Billie, the teenaged protagonist of the title story, isn't even sure that the con-artist couple she's grown up with are her real parents. In "Suitcase," Marie is one of the many young people who drift into an urban commune in San Francisco in the early seventies. Pen, in "Ticket," has been dumped by her husband and decides to take a cross-country trip to see a dying aunt she's never met. The young woman in "Yukon River" (possibly Billie a few years later) follows a guy she meets in a bar to Alaska, where he has bought some land, sight unseen, in the hopes of finding "an immense and perfect silence.... someplace where you can make up your own life. Where there's nobody else to screw things up." Diane's prose is supple, engaging, and full of quiet humor. These are characters who have plenty of cause for self-pity, but who, refreshingly, don't pity themselves, and Simmons doesn't pity them either. Even a stick-in-the-mud like this reviewer, whose life has been lived in few locations, can hear the call of the drifty, itchy parts of herself while reading this vivid collection.

[Meredith Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful tales of wanderers-- hard edged and humorous.