"On a journey overland in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, still damp with Scottish air, discovered Nebraska to be "a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth." Locals, too, admit there's something shapeless about their state. "The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska," Willa Cather wrote in My Ántonia, a novel steeped in the lonesomeness of life on the prairie."
"It was slim, at just over 150 pages, and diverged sharply from the two satires of queer urbanism that had preceded it. The cover-featuring an illustration of a drab outbuilding bisected by utility poles-promised a work of rural naturalism: a simpler Wright Morris, a gentler James Purdy. Instead, Nebraska plays out with the closeness of a family chamber drama, even as it doubles as an oblique allegory of AIDS."
Somewhere between Chicago and California, Nebraska appears as a grassy mirage defined by flat geometry and unremitting panoramas that resist easy definition. Travelers described it as almost featureless, an empty sky and empty earth, and local accounts emphasize a persistent stillness. Such expanses promote inward turns toward psychic vistas. A slim 1987 novel titled Nebraska abandons previous urban satires for rural naturalism and concentrates on intimate family interactions. The novel's cover evokes modest outbuildings and utility poles, but the narrative unfolds with the closeness of a chamber drama while functioning also as an oblique allegory of AIDS.
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