Get into the American Spirit with 5 Fairbound Works of Summer Fiction

Some Luck, by Jane Smiley
The Iowa State Fair (running this year August 13–23) plays a big role in the first installment of Jane Smiley’s masterful projected Century Trilogy, following Iowa farm family the Langdons from 1920 through 2020. At the 1934 fair, eldest son Frank “was fourteen, but he looked sixteen and acted eighteen.” While Frank’s more farming-inclined twelve-year-old brother Joey shows a Southdown ewe named Emily at the fair, Frank manages to steal onto the midway and make it past second base with an older girl. And neither Frank nor Joey throw up from too much funnel cake, watermelon, and hot dogs, despite their mother’s dire predictions. (The Iowa State Fair also figures in Smiley’s second book in the trilogy, Early Warning.)

Evel Knievel Days, by Pauls Toutonghi
The biggest party in Butte, Montana, is Evel Knievel Days (running this year July 23–25), during which daredevil motorcycle riders celebrate all things Evel, including flaming trucks, pyrotechnics, and the “American Motordome Wall of Death.” Pauls Toutonghi, who titled his winning first novel after the annual event, tells the story of Khosi Saqur Clark, the son of an absent Egyptian father and a cuisine-obsessed mother who’s a descendant of Butte’s famous “Copper King.” Khosi works as a tour guide in the Copper King Mansion, but a crisis forces him to leave his beloved Butte for the first time ever, to seek his father in Cairo. Madcap hilarity and emotional connections ensue.

Truth Like the Sun, by Jim Lynch
The Seattle 1962 World’s Fair is at the heart of Jim Lynch’s fine novel Truth Like the Sun. Planners rushed to finish the Space Needle in time for the fair, hoping it would beckon newcomers to the city. “Where better to start afresh?” Lynch writes, “A whole new way of living in a city of things to come. That’s right. A city so short on history it’s mostly all future anyway.” Lynch cuts between the events of the 1962 fair and the mayoral run, 50 years later, of Roger Morgan, the now-70 visionary who spearheaded the fair. It looks like the political winds are blowing in Morgan’s favor until an investigative journalist gets hold of his story and digs into the secrets of his past.

Cowboys and East Indians, by Nina McConigley
McConigley’s fantastic debut story collection, which won the PEN Open Book Award, introduces many characters who are “the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming.” In the story “Reserve Champion,” Casper woman Delia Chalk is busy sewing for a doll dressing competition at the National Bank of Wyoming. “Next to the table was her trophy case,” McConigley writes. “It was stuffed with ribbons from the county and state fair, contests, and competitions—all from her handiwork. Reserve Champion. Reserve Champion. Reserve Champion. The pale pink rosettes made a garden in her case. Reserve Champion. It was better than first place all right, but not quite the best. It was a kind of purgatory of ribbons.” Delia feels sure she can finally win first place at the bank’s contest, but she hadn’t counted on stiff competition from Mrs. Gupta, an immigrant from India who sews a mean miniature sari. A new edition of Cowboys and East Indians has just been released.

John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead’s second novel remains one of my favorites out of his many books. Freelance journalist J. Sutter is a “junketeer,” surviving on freebies, buffets, and complimentary trips offered by companies that want him to write about their products. In July of 1996, a website sends Sutter to cover John Henry Days in Talcott, West Virginia. The event will commemorate the steel-driving folk hero and celebrate the release of a new John Henry postage stamp. Hilarity and deep thoughts about America follow.