Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner

I was afraid when I began this book that it was going to attempt to emulate the Russian master. In saying this, I'm probably revealing my own proletarian ignorance. I've never managed to finish Anna Karenina, although I've started it several times in my life. Maybe someday, because I want to read it, honest! Life gets in the way, just as it has for MJ Andersen. You have to make a living. She ended up at the Providence Journal for these many years. I ended up working for the Defense Department - as a Russian linguist, no less. So I know I should read Tolstoy; I've just not gotten around to it yet. I'm too fascinated by personal memoirs - like this one, which, as it turns out, is perhaps one of the best I've read this year. I'm a midwesterner too, and when I retired I came back home. Thomas Wolf says you can't do that, but so far it's worked out okay for me. Stay tuned on that. I've never been to South Dakota, except maybe in the movies. Remember Doris Day singing "Take me back to the Black Hills/The Black Hills of Dakota ..." in the film musical Calamity Jane? Like that, okay? But Andersen gave me a real sense of what it was like growing up in a small town on the plains, playing with toy horses, worshiping Roy Rogers, playing war. Gee, now that I think about it, it was very much like my own kidhood here in west Michigan. There is a sense of the randomness and tragedy here that often marks ordinary lives. She shows us this in her mother's figh with MS and her parents lifelong struggle just to make a living. There is also a continuous vein of dry drollity here that is found in only the best memoirs. After considering Kierkegaard's lifelong circular search for the meaning of life and God, she sums it up: "Oh, that Soren; what a cutup he was." Near the very end of the book, Andersen seems to be lamenting the fact that she was never able to emulate Tolstoy the way she'd dreamed of as a college student. She feels she has somehow failed. Au contraire, MJ. Portable Prairie is literature, and of the best and most accessible kind. You say: "I cannot bear having come so far only to find myself in this same place ever and forever, incapable of creating a single character other than myself." You've come a long way, Baby. I mean, think about it: Princeton, Brown. And the character you have created - yourself - is a memorable one, a very human one. You come across as a complex yet likeable person I would be proud to know; to perhaps have as a neighbor. So few people these days seem to ponder the great imponderables. You and Leo do it well. If you never write another book, you should know that this one is very important. I noticed Garrison Keillor already said it in his comment, but I'll say it again. "Tolstoy would be proud." Good job! - Tim Bazzett, author of Reed City Boy

I grew up in South Dakota, and really enjoyed and appreciated how this book captures the feelings of that experience: the beauty of the endless prairie meeting the boundless sky far off on the horizon, the wonder and awe of Minneapolis, and the feeling that you never quite fit in anywhere else in the world but the prairie.

M.J. Andersen's search for home will resonate with just about anyone, whether you've moved a 100 times or lived in the same town your entire life. She is looking not just for a physical space to call her own, but an emotional one as well. Anderson's story is both amusing and touching, as she takes the reader through her childhood in South Dakota, through her years on the east coast - first at Princeton and eventually in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She understands the human need to find what is recognizable in any place - especially in a place where one's ancestors originated. She writes in an easy, thoughtful style that evokes all the landscapes she is intimately familiar with. The book is deep without being weighty. In addition, as a transplant myself, and someone one who found herself living in Cambridge, I found Andersen's take on Boston and Cambridge to be right on the mark. She finds the humor in a place that often takes itself too seriously.

Portable Prairie is a brilliant memoir. M. J. Andersen introduces one little story after another and then refers to each again and again, weaving it all together in a wonderful tapestry. She understands that home is more a place in the mind than a place on the map. It is beautiful writing and my favorite of anything I've read in the last few years. It is the kind of book I will keep to enjoy again.

In Portable Prairie, M.J. Andersen's biographical meditation on home, we are challenged to answer for ourselves: is home a location, a place, or do we carry it around with us as the snail carries his shell? In weaving the threads of her life and intellectual growth, she creates a rich tapestry in which we, as readers, can see elements of our own experience. Andersen travels the country and the world in her search, mixing Tolstoy and Disneyland, Kierkegaard and shopping. Oh, and it's funny - Andersen will draw you along as though building an argument in debate and then leave you laughing out loud.