"State by State" takes readers on an offbeat road trip across the country

"State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America"

edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Ecco, 572 pp., $29.95

BOOK REVIEW |

Let's begin, for obvious reasons, with the nine naked women mooning me, linked by arms around necks and waists like reverse Rockettes, but without the kicking and costumery.

They occupy a black-and-white bumograph captioned by the mischievous Heidi Julavits: "Insult with a Smile: the Sirens of MAINE welcome you." They don't, but more of that later.

Julavits, an accomplished novelist, is one of the 50 writers asked to capture the spiritus loci of Maine and the 49 others in "State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America." The project harks back to the Works Progress Administration's 1930s program to support writers by commissioning book-length state guides.

Today we have essays of varying length, including two (Oregon and Vermont) in graphic-novel mode, plus an interview with the novelist Edward P. Jones about Washington, D.C., and a collection of touristy snapshots and family-album photos from the contributors.

Between the endpapers' cartoonish U.S. map, there is also a batch of statistical pages and a brace of introductions by the two editors, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey.

Weiland's preface helpfully defines the intent: "a road trip in book form," written by "our finest novelists and reporters." Wilsey then goes on for 13 pages about a road trip he made in 2002 and makes no attempt to connect explicitly to the book's mission. It's a perfect warmup for the motley assemblage that follows.

Honor roll

First, though, some awards:

• Best origin of a state's name to Wisconsin for "French corruption of an Indian word that may have meant 'river that meanders through something red.' "

• Best state motto is Hawaii's "Ua Mau ke Ea o ka 'Aina i ka Pono."

• Best and worst digression goes to California, with William T. Vollmann's trip to a San Francisco S&M club.

• Best state bird could only be New Mexico's roadrunner (beep-beep!).

• Best statistical table goes to Toothlessness Rate: "Percentage of adults aged 65 and over who have had all of their natural teeth extracted" (No. 1 is West Virginia at 40.5 percent, No. 50 is Hawaii at 9.6 percent).

• If you want to know more about the writer's life and family than about the state, I would direct you to Rick Moody on Connecticut, Joshua Ferris on Florida and Susan Choi on Indiana. If you want writers who have some fun getting the job done, go to Dave Eggers on Illinois and John Hodgman on Massachusetts. For writing that entertains and informs, you need to visit Idaho with Anthony Doerr and Virginia with Tony Horwitz.

Odd angles

Sometimes a limited view of a state affords other prospects. Dagoberto Gilb describes a tiny corner of Iowa in a parable-like story of Mexicans traveling there to help with the corn crop. In Kentucky, John Jeremiah Sullivan chooses the moment when a French genius named Constantine Rafinesque and John James Audubon met for the first time in a captivating mini-history.

Other outstanding essays:

• Benjamin Kunkel not only charmed me with his story of growing up in a hippie cabin in Colorado, but he spends more time than most thinking about what a state is.

• Craig Taylor conveys Delaware through a string of voices, from Butcher to Bookseller to ex-Governor, like Virtues or Perils in an Everyman play.

• Myla Goldberg's Maryland combines geography, politics and personal history informatively and wittily.

• Charles Bock manages a nice juxtaposition of Nevada's Las Vegas glitter with the pawnshop and liquor store his family owned in the city.

Meet New York

Jonathan Franzen has the cleverest tack, using imagined interviews with New York state officials to deliver myriad factoids until he finally lands an interview with the state itself.

I enjoyed the rich class distinctions Jack Hitt explores in South Carolina and Daphne Beal in Wisconsin, and the way nature overwhelms in Ann Patchett's Tennessee and Jayne Anne Phillips' West Virginia.

As for Julavits, she writes of a Maine that rejects as a "From Away" anyone who isn't purely native. She's amusingly, reductively critical and reluctantly appreciative of the natives as she looks back after uprooting from that stony soil: "Meanwhile, 2005 was business as usual — just a lot of fat people hanging out in the rain with their cats, drinking coffee brandy and trying, without cheating, to kill a bear."

Her essay doesn't even mention the Sirens. So I take the photo to be a Parthian shot, a ninefold cheeky kiss-off.