Booknotes: Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

A haunting and haunted book about loss, trauma, and memory, which manages to recast central Iowa as an uncanny and emotionally resonant place.

The initial conceit of the book–that a video store in late 90’s rural Iowa is home to VHS tapes which contain spliced-in scenes of strange and disturbing images–is an entry point for something much more unsettling and complex. Indeed, what is clear is that just as the reader is trying to solve the mystery of the tapes, so to are the characters who are making them, using the imagery of popular cinema as a canvas for investigating or reconfiguring memory. What unfolds is a story of the lengths we go to cope with tragedy, and how imagery and memory overlap in the heart of our trauma.

I grew up in Iowa, not far from where this book takes place geographically, although light-years from it socially. My hometown of Cedar Rapids has been an industrial and agricultural processing center since the 19th century, but the world of Universal Harvester is bent around farms and farming, and the small towns that emerge and sprout between the great acreages of Central and Western Iowa, Nevada and Collins and Colo and many more. Even in the 1990s, when the book is set, these farms were falling away. Farmers are ancient and distant relatives of characters here. The one farmer we meet, named Lyle, buys a new piece of farm equipment he doesn’t need because he “wanted to talk to somebody about his new toy,” which he plans to use to make a fishing pond. The world of the 1990s is one where old things no longer seem to fit, and yet linger into the present and haunt the future.

Most representations of the Midwest, and of Iowa in particular, play with or against sentimentality. Rural life is depicted as timeless, small-scale, familially-focused, and emotionally simple. Darnielle works against this Hallmark-esque tableau in a number of ways. The structure of the novel destabilizes simplistic expectations, jumping across time, backwards and forwards into the lives of well-known characters or introducing new ones, and with unusual interjections by a mostly-unknown narrator. In this way, the book sidesteps our narrative and emotional expectations, giving the whole book an aura of weirdness and uncertainty.

In this sense, it’s hard to sketch the plot, because we really only come to understand what we’re reading when we’re near the end. Jeremy Heldt’s initial confusion and scrutiny of the aforementioned tapes lead to his boss Sarah Jane’s visit with Lisa Sample, whose story reverses time into the weird world of post-1960s Christian cults, then jumps forward into the lives of transplanted Pratt family, who are the recipients of the tapes and the house in which they were made (Lisa’s, we learn), and who, in turn, illuminate Jeremy’s relationship with his father and deceased mother, and the arc of Lisa’s yearning and investigative project. The twin suns of the book are the lives of Lisa and Jeremy, both hobbled and propelled by tragedy, and for whom images (films, photographs, and memories) are the terrain in which they map a way through their pain.

As a mid-western expatriate, I found myself lingering on Darnielle’s depictions of the landscape of central Iowa; the area around Ames and the small towns that, in the author’s words “most people couldn’t find on a map.” His description of the wind that blows over the farmlands of the plains is magical:

The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It’s the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins; the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago, it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can’t usually see it in paintings, but it’s an important part of the scenery. (82)

Passages like this litter the book, as do profoundly human and sympathetic explorations of the characters. Sarah Jane, after meeting Lisa and uncovering the story of the tapes, drives silently away, placing the story she’s heard “in a secret chamber of [her] heart, where the person she’d hoped to be by now has set up shop and is making do with available materials."(62) James Pratt, after discovering the tapes a decade later, ponders an empty grain silo across from his parent’s house as a place he might’ve played had he grown up here, but “when he pictured a boy who might make this tiny silo his playhouse, he saw someone whose nearest friend was clear across the neighboring field."(199) As with his songwriting in the Mountain Goats, Darnielle has an astonishing gift for finding the majestic, exalted, and poetic in quiet, everyday moments like these, moments overlooked or soon forgotten even by the people living them.

Universal Harvester only revealed itself to me on a second pass, its forms taking shape like the strange scenes chopped up and spliced into commercial videotapes that fuel the engine of the book. I read this book first as I was driving back to visit my parents in Iowa, traveling across five states. I was both captivated and confused by it, and listened to the audiobook, richly and engagingly read by Darnielle, almost as soon as I closed the cover. This second reading clarified and amplified the book for me, and my appreciation for it as a counter-pastoral grew. This isn’t a book that’s easy to recommend because it doesn’t give easy satisfactions or resolutions, but it is a brilliant book, thoughtful and human, and deeply strange in the best possible way.