Mad Prairie: Stories and a Novella
by Kate McIntyre
University of Georgia Press, 2022. $19.95
Reviewed by Anuradha Prasad
A winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Kate McIntyre’s Mad Prairie: Stories and a Novella is a sharp and witty observation of stifling Kansas. In these interlinked stories, we encounter a parade of passive, hapless, and sinister characters, as they tread wildly absurd and terrifying paths. Each story, centered on Kansas and Kansans, is as funny as it is outrageous. Perhaps it is in McIntyre’s caricaturing that truth stands threadbare and gleams brightest.
“Prairie Vision” opens the collection with a spectacular start. Narrated by a glib politician who is equally narcissistic and callous, the story transpires at a salt mine (which the narrator owns) where trapped miners are being rescued. McIntyre’s story highlights the exploitative, pornographic, and performative culture while also tracking the politician’s own rise to power, his motivations, and a loss that haunts him.
In “The Moat,” a woman in an abusive marriage is in denial until her isolation is complete. Her yard becomes representative of her growing turmoil. Here, the trajectory of an abusive and quickly deteriorating marriage—the exchanges with their menacing and placating undertones, the tight-rope tension in the unspoken, and the slow surfacing of an unavoidable knowing—is narrated with precision and detachment: “‘That bird shouldn’t have flown in front of the boys’ guns,’ Vern had told her. ‘What did it think would happen?’” (34). In fact, abusive patterns, passivity, and an illusory lack of choice emerge often throughout other narratives too.
“The Tunnel” introduces Miriam, a young schoolgirl plotting her escape from her town in central Kansas. Ambitious, she wants to make her way out before she gets pregnant and is forced to get married and set up home in her hometown. She is also a teenager, caught between her ambition and hormones, often playing down her intelligence to be accepted by her peers. Following the untimely deaths of her parents and their cat, clouded by the grief she refuses to acknowledge but which turns into something insidious, a grown-up Miriam returns from college to another dubious town in western Kansas as an idealistic Rural and Rising teacher in the novella “Culvert Rising.” She is its tragic protagonist succumbing to grief and the casual corruption that seems to be rife in Kansas.
Kansas drives and permeates the entire collection. It’s portrayed as a dead end to dreams—stunted and stifling, its landscape uninspiring. The characters and their lives could be considered a sad consequence of the place. There are the mean and exploitative and the naïve and resigned caught up in their little worlds with no instinct to leave lives that are a microcosm of the larger problem that the place seems to represent. Only a few escape its grasp but then just barely.
Throughout Mad Prairie, McIntyre uses place to her advantage whether it is a moat severing a woman’s connection with the world, the solid façade of a school masking the decay and ruin within, the tunnel between two wings—Lincoln and Roosevelt—that Miriam walks contemplating her choices, or the increasingly stifling weather that climaxes into a twister, a gathering of all the fury and smallness of Kansas.
Kate McIntyre crafts her characters and their foibles with care just as she paints Kansas with spare, deft strokes. Each story, expertly layered, continues to reverberate long after reading it, making this an outstanding collection.
Anuradha Prasad is a writer and copyeditor living in Bangalore, India. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Literally Stories, Borderless Journal, Bangalore Review, and Muse India. She is currently exploring her interest in nature, travel, and wildlife.