Midwestern Death Trip opens with quotes collected in Wisconsin Death Trip. Pulled from the local papers in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, during the 1890s—those Gay Nineties—they tell stories of barns set aflame, lake monsters stealing hogs, and a woman split in three by the train. Meaghan Garvey sets the tone for the memoir ahead, situating the Midwest not as “void of drama” but as a world filled with aging bards drunk on Old Styles and visionaries overcome with baroque dreams.
Her inspiration, Michael Lesy’s 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip, was a spiral into the past, sucked into the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the haunting, fin-de-siècle images of Charles Van Schaick—those stills of babies in open caskets and farmers and fiddlers with crazed eyes. Lesy’s descent into these dusty archives recalls a story he told me about the Depression-era photographer Walker Evans: He once walked into a Dollar General and was rapt, somehow transfixed, by the bargain goods lining the shelves. Evans, like Lesy (I’d argue), had this unbridled sense of attention and joy. His eye never lapsed, always caught in this state of reception.
This intensity, this ability to find stories where others refuse to look, is the basis of Garvey’s project, taking place down winding country roads in a blood-red Cadillac. She sets off, trawling rural dives and supper clubs, hoping to find the strangeness of the Midwestern spirit lingering in the present. That open road defines both form and content of Garvey’s 2026 collection, each essay another stop (or two) along the dizzying network of county highways. She takes US Route 41 all the way north to the Upper Peninsula, but she just as easily pulls off, headed twenty minutes toward Gay, Michigan, a hollowed mining town stripped of everything but its name. Her essays are pulled by two desires: the stream of fast-paced images whirring past the reader and the detour, the digression, the slow meander.
On these journeys through the Midwest, Garvey meets Buddhists addicted to coke, Jeffrey Epstein’s exterminator, and a bartender who rose from the dead. Journalism quickly becomes Romantic, and you begin to wonder: To what extent does Garvey deal in folklore? How far does she get sucked into the lies of these locals, worlds fabricated by men who grip onto the Tartarian Empire? Compared to the world of Wisconsin Death Trip—one made so estranging by its flat tone, each event narrated journalistically, so spare and matter-of-fact—Garvey’s descriptions are indulgent. They taste of fried fish and white Russians. Each detail is suffused with fantasy. The hundred-foot mound in Cairo, Illinois, starts to rival the Pyramids; post-industrial residues, copper vats, and old steam pumps are agglomerated into a labyrinth of manufacturing and decay; in a quiet town, busts of Nietzsche and Beethoven become an aging bachelor’s roommates. In Garvey’s Midwest, people live in the maximalist, almost fictive worlds they have fashioned for themselves, riding on carousels with armored mermaids and roosters, or log cabins with a “murky 4,000-gallon aquarium.”
But even Lesy, so tethered to the archive, has received criticism for dwelling in fiction. The initial readers of Wisconsin Death Trip were unable to “decide if it was poetry or history, a fabrication or a discourse, a hoax or a revelation.” For Lesy, it was fabricated. Wisconsin Death Trip was an experiment in collaging, through both image and language. Lesy takes Van Schaick’s photos of taxidermied deer and mirrors and splits them in half, and sutures the news into a montage of psychological crises and diphtheria. Textually, Lesy mainly intervenes through composition. Operating under the guise of chronology, he stages poetic juxtapositions (for example, news of a butcher dying from a nine-day nosebleed is followed by a failed decapitation performed by an amateur magician).
These stories feel surreal, and the archives and the journalistic discoveries inspire doubt, but the spirit lives on. The relationship between Lesy’s and Garvey’s texts presupposes a continuity between the madness of Black River Falls and the strangeness of the contemporary Midwest, one which even the historian picked up on. When Michael Lesy met the mother of his first wife, she seemed straight from Wisconsin Death Trip. Walking into her quaint, Midwestern house, Lesy was immediately quizzed, “You know what the price of pork loin is these days?” A reformed Jew who kept kosher, Lesy bluffed and bought time before being interrupted by the follow-up, “You believe in the apocalypse?” She only asked the important questions. For Lesy, this was perfect—a portal back into Black River Falls, a woman stripped from the archive and reanimated, someone who lives both in the present and the end of times.
The more Lesy learned about his mother-in-law, Hazel, the more he lost himself in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the more her stories somehow became standard. She was institutionalized after the birth of one of her kids, compelled to kill herself with boiling water, yet Lesy brushed it off: “I don’t think any of this is extraordinary. I think life is very difficult. That’s travail.” Like Hazel, those old residents in Black River Falls lived among tragedy, and they lived casually among it. If a guest visited, they would go through their photo albums, flipping through photos of dead children, “and for a moment, commiserate.” The town did not have a higher incidence of mental illness, infanticide, or religious extremism. Black River Falls was just an average town in turn-of-the-century Wisconsin, which meant it was totally paranoid and wild.
For Garvey, the old spirit of Wisconsin can reemerge through spectacle and self-parody. The blissful escape of the pineries, where men “caught smallpox from each other and clap from the girls in the dens,” transmutes into the Lumberjack World Championships, where men run vertically up trees and free-fall down their trunks, just to celebrate by smoking outside the small-town strip club.
And sometimes, this tendency toward parody and excess creates something totally unrecognizable. Take the Pinehurst Inn in Indian River, Michigan. It is owned by Alvis, an Elvis impersonator inspired “not by the rockabilly stud of the late 1950s or the black-leather Elvis of the ’68 comeback special but the pill-bloated Sun King of the late Las Vegas years, when he was pushed onstage to pantomime his former glories.” It’s an impersonation of a man reduced to impersonation, or rather, a hamfisted attempt to revive the past in the present, one so imperfectly accomplished that it becomes a beautiful, tragic invention. The excess found in Indian River continues as Garvey enters the Dam Site Inn in Pellston. There, she meets a man who tells her of the ascendant rise and fall of his wealth, how inheriting a few Norman Rockwell paintings led to a cross-country motorcycle journey and, eventually, drug-fueled, late-night lawn mowing. Every character is full of too much life. Fantasy punctures through their sallow skin and radiates off their bodies.
Garvey continually plays with that line between myth and reality, the mix of lies and histories disclosed at the bar, a form of journalism which says as much about its narrator as the doubted narrative. One Midwestern man, mired in masculine myth, pops up continuously throughout the essay collection: Ernest Hemingway, dubbed by his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, as “the biggest literary liar since Munchausen.” And those lies and all that bravado linger over the aged men who populate the bars in Midwestern Death Trip. Garvey seems to catch these broken, lost boomers in their routine, at the dive telling the same story they’ve been telling for twenty-five years now, each time more embellished and haughty.
In a way, Midwestern Death Trip is a portrait of the myth-makers. Garvey’s work leans on archetypes insofar as to show you the psychology of their fabricators. In this land that both she and Lesy describe as a land of false promises, where the American Dream dissolved into disappointment and desolation, she sees beauty and tragedy in, for instance, that lonely Elvis impersonator, a dying star clinging on to the promise of glory. And for Alvis, the man captivated by redemption, for a brief moment, the spotlight still flickers in that bar with the broken jukebox and our faded American flag.
