Portable Prairie : Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner

by M.J. Andersen

In a moving and bittersweet story, M.J. Andersen chronicles her childhood and adolescence in South Dakota, her departure to forge her own life, and her persistent longing for the landscape she left behind. Her hometown, given the fictional name of Plainville, is so quiet that one local family regularly parks by the tracks to watch the train pass through. Yet small-town life and, especially, the prairie prove to be fertile ground for Andersen's imagination. Exploring subjects as seemingly unrelated as Roy Rogers and Tolstoy's beloved Anna Karenina, she repeatedly locates a transcendent connection with South Dakota's broad horizon.

Andersen introduces us to her hardworking newspaper family, which produces one of Plainville's two competing weeklies; to Job's Daughters, a Christian association intended to prepare young women for adversity (Plainville's chapter assumes the added responsibility of throwing the town's best teen dances); and even to a local variety of hardy alfalfa, to which her best friend has a surprising kinship.

Leaving behind her physical home, Andersen travels East for college, remaining to begin a journalism career. With her husband she eventually settles into her first house, a beautiful Victorian that, though loved, somehow does not feel like home in the way she had anticipated. Through subsequent travels, memories, and a meditation on Tolstoy's complex relationship to his ancestral home, she arrives at a new idea of what home is -- one that should resonate with every American who has ever had to pull up stakes.

Genres: Memoir

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andersen writes an account of her life that has been shaped by her childhood in South Dakota. It was more an essay on the meaning of home than a memoir, but an enlightening and thoughtful essay nonetheless. The central question she addresses is why Americans feel such a drive to leave home, yet spend their entire lives trying to go back to it. She ties in Tolstoy and other literary greats into it, making the book informative and philosophical in nature.
Because the central theme is 'home' - and this word itself probably shows up hundreds of time throughout - the narration was disconnected in time, and at times it was difficult to see the cohesiveness of her experiences. She would skip from marriage to childhood to college to high school and by the end I struggled to figure out how it all fit together.

I was fascinated, however, with her life so different from mine, yet connected by universal emotions. She grew up in a prairie, eyes from horizon to horizon, and I've always dreaded the thought of the plain states. She went to an Ivy League college which, though making me feel slightly inadequate since she's just as scared as I am but with a much more prestigious degree, also reaffirmed what I always thought. A Princeton education doesn't guarantee security or happiness. In fact, it seems to lead only to more anxieties and worries.

I hope Andersen finds the home she's always longed for, though if her melancholy writing is at all telling, she's still searching. But then again, so are most of us.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a beautiful book. It's a meditation on where "home" really is, but it is also a growing up story, a story about looking for God, about being out of one's element, and breaking ground in a new place. I wish I had read this just out of college, I think I would have felt less alone. (And she went to Princeton!)

[Julie Richert-Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This favorite quote . . . Oh, my heart!
"Grandpa Hansen was a distinquished professor of horticulture at South Dakota State University, in Brookings. He became known as the Burbank of the Plains for his work on plants that could survive the harsh weather where we lived. The Lillian Gibson rose was the least of it. Grandpa Hansen came up with more than three hundred new kinds of plants designed to thrive on the American prairies and northern plains. He worked on everything from forage crops to fruits. When he was a boy, the homesteaders in Dakota Territory were desperate to find something that would grow there. It had to survive the Nordic winters and withering summers. This was no Eden, they had figured out right away. This was the place where everything came with only the greatest difficulty, where God repeatedly brought you to your knees, and therefore almost always had your attention."

[Johns · Rating 5 out of 5]

A talented writer reared in a small town on the Dakota's barren plains polishes her education at both Princeton and Brown universities never to reside again on the prairie. But never able to shed her childhood experiences. (Who of us can?)

Compellingly written. This book makes me want to read more of her work, although I have yet to find another book by this author in any catalog.

Sadly, as she admits in the chapter entitled, "Jerusalem," she succumbs to the deadly virus so prevalent in universities of the American East: she loses the bedrock Christian truths so carefully ladled out, measure by measure, in her youth. She declares herself to be full of faith but devoid of belief (pg 216.)

Still, beautiful writing here.

[Dorise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an ambitious memoir that tells Anderson’s story in a broader literary context, exploring Tolstoy’s life journey in parallel and also bringing in a more global perspective during her time in Israel. The sequencing of Anderson’s remembrances is not chronological, and I found that this, along with some of the heavier-handed literary passages, made for a slower read.

My life has gone in the opposite direction - from the East Coast to the Midwest - and I do find a stronger sense of comfort and home here in Northeast Ohio, and a deeper feeling of history and permanence than I ever felt in the Washington, D.C. area. Anderson effectively captures the feelings of one’s original home and how we sometimes yearn for it in our subsequent journeys.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andersen writes an account of her life that has been shaped by her childhood in South Dakota. It was more an essay on the meaning of home than a memoir, but an enlightening and thoughtful essay nonetheless. The central question she addresses is why Americans feel such a drive to leave home, yet spend their entire lives trying to go back to it. She ties in Tolstoy and other literary greats into it, making the book informative and philosophical in nature.
Because the central theme is ‘home’ - and this word itself probably shows up hundreds of time throughout - the narration was disconnected in time, and at times it was difficult to see the cohesiveness of her experiences. She would skip from marriage to childhood to college to high school and by the end I struggled to figure out how it all fit together.

I was fascinated, however, with her life so different from mine, yet connected by universal emotions. She grew up in a prairie, eyes from horizon to horizon, and I’ve always dreaded the thought of the plain states. She went to an Ivy League college which, though making me feel slightly inadequate since she’s just as scared as I am but with a much more prestigious degree, also reaffirmed what I always thought. A Princeton education doesn’t guarantee security or happiness. In fact, it seems to lead only to more anxieties and worries.

I hope Andersen finds the home she’s always longed for, though if her melancholy writing is at all telling, she’s still searching. But then again, so are most of us.

[Jane Healy]

This memoir, by a woman from a small SD town she calls "Plainville," writes about how now matter how far away she's traveled or lived, the prairie is home. She's a good writer, and I especially appreciated her childhood reminiscences, which would be instantly recognizable to anyone from the small-town prairie. In her life on the East Coast and in world travels, she observes the effect of place on the people who live there. She frames her memoir with comparisons to Tolstoy and his love for his home in Russia. Her admiration for him far exceeds mine, but her conclusion seems to be that we are fated to live a certain life because of where we call home.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by Barb Erban, author is Pton '75. I really liked this meditation on home and family and what effect your physical and cultural surroundings have on your development. Since the author is my own age, so many of the things she talks about having or liking as a child are things that I remember, too.

[Paulcbry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book that delves into the philosophical idea of home. The author interweaves her thoughts with ideas presented in Anna Karenina and the philosophy of Kierkegaard. The author also reflects back on watching serial westerns (i.e. Roy Rogers) while growing up on the South Dakota plains.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw my childhood in this book. Anyone who grew up in small own middle America will "get it".

[Lisa Cerqueira · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poetice memoir about growing up on the prairie of South Dakota and her later search for home, seen through the lens of Tolstoy as the author gets older and studies literature in college.