In PRAIRIE CITY, IOWA Douglas Bauer has written an evocative pitch-perfect 'biography' of a time and a particular place. It is not a memoir, as I had expected. But it was not a disappointment either. Because Bauer is a skilled observer and reporter. Indeed, at one point he admits that the book is more reportage than memories. But this guy is one helluva good reporter, clear-eyed and objective. And this is no easy task, when you consider that Bauer grew up in Prairie City and is writing about friends, family members and neighbors - subjects fraught with uneasiness and not for the faint-hearted. About himself, Bauer remains a bit circumspect, telling us only that he was something of an outsider in this small Iowa farming community. He went away, but not very far away, to college, then a couple of journalism jobs he didn't seem to much care for, a marriage that didn't work out. So he came home with the express purpose of writing about where he came from.

While he writes, he becomes involved, working at the local grain elevator, tending bar, helping his father farm. He follows local politics and a mayoral and town council race. He mentally files away information and later writes it down. Actual interviews are not really emphasized, which is probably a good thing, since writing is not considered a serious profession by the citizens of Prairie City. People wonder aloud, "When are you going to work for a living?" They don't mean to be rude. They're just curious. "Work is measured here in bushels, head, acres, miles per day behind a wheel. I didn't expect anyone to understand the muscular worth of writing."

What impressed me most about PRAIRIE CITY, IOWA, was that Bauer was only about thirty years old when he wrote it. (It was first published in 1979 and has only recently been reprinted.) And yet he knows how to zero in on the important truths. Here's a sample -

"In Prairie City, nothing is more manifest than the designated steps toward death. Squares on a game board.: first home, small and rented. Children. New home, long, new, bedrooms for the future. In town, in the country. Smaller home. Nursing home. Funeral home ...

"... one can see just as clearly the exact fashion of his future. A man visits his mother at Clearview Manor and knows that he'll be visited there. He'll lean forward, mean with pain, in the same beige lobby and strain to hear his son's cheery litanies. Most of us will end this way, in a clean beige room, dutifully visited, but mercifully, we don't know its precise address ..."

As someone who currently visits my own mother in such a place, Bauer's description of the steps toward death and that 'clean beige room,' rang chillingly true. The young author saw things clearly and he wrote it down truthfully. Now Bauer is about my age, on the downslope of his sixties. I wonder if he has revisited his own thirty year-old clearsighted vision recently. I think he has. In the Coda, added for the new addition, he writes poignantly of his own father's decline and death and his mother's failing strength and reduced circumstances. I suspect it was hard for him to write these things. It's hard to read about them, but it is still good reportage, mixed this time with more memories and experience.

Doug Bauer was/is a good son. He was/is also a good writer and this is still a damn good book. ( )