On All Sides Nowhere

Starred review from June 3, 2002
In 1972 Gruber left his job as a New York journalist for graduate school at the University of Idaho, where in simplicity and solitude, he and his wife would homestead their 40 acres in rural Alder Creek. At first, their days "were full of emptiness," Gruber marveled; he could hear "traces of conversation" nearly half a mile away and, standing on his porch, listen to the falling snow. But even if the population was sparse, neighbors knew each others' business and were remarkably tolerant of each others' idiosyncrasies. People distrusted hippies, but "hippies were always somebody other than the person they were talking to." As Gruber settles in, he meditates on the aesthetics of junked cars ("a peasant's version of garden statuary"), the Zen of felling trees or the dangers of the chain saw, which with "diminutive innocence" was "forever looking for ways to get you." Now an English professor at Emory University, Gruber is so confident in his writing that he doesn't hesitate to reach for an obscure term (e.g., simulacrum, tessellation, bricolage, lipogram) if it makes his point more precisely. Nor does he have qualms with enjoying the dated idiom of his rural neighbors, with their iceboxes, davenports and parlors. While Gruber's writing is a gift, even better are the simple but profound truths he shares: "We sometimes forget that the most important thing we can do with our lives is to make them models for somebody else to follow." Gruber's Idaho is like the Troy first and famously uncovered by 19th-century German archeologist Schliemann: in actuality, there isn't a whole lot there, but the author makes it seem full and magical, all the same. (Aug. 15)Forecast:Winner of Bread Loaf's Bakeless Prize, this trim volume deserves wide readership. It's a "guy's" memoir so nuanced and literate that women will enjoy it, too.

August 1, 2002
Ostensibly an urbanite's back-to-the-land memoir, Gruber's reflections quickly dispense with nature-admiring panegyrics. Setting up shop in the 1970s in Idaho's northern neck was arduous work for English grad-student Gruber and his wife, since they were short on cash and had no access to running water, spare car parts, or professional builders. In this do-it-yourself world, Gruber essays how he soon became disabused from looking down on inhabitants' ramshackle cabins and junked cars. Although the structures were shabby, he understands how his distant neighbors harbored plans of improvement, and although the plans may have been grandiose and ill-grounded in reality, they often were a sign of optimism. These schemes animated the community gossip network, creating bartering, borrowing, and commiserating, and the personalities Gruber met are efficiently and honestly portrayed--no wonder his work won a prize from the annual Vermont Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. A discerning depiction of a particular time and place and the age-old urge to move west.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)