Cameos of Kansas : PRAIRYERTH (a deep map)<i> By William Least Heat-Moon (A Peter Davison Book/Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 622 pp.) </i>

It is part of the national character of American writers to take pride in their eccentricity and to claim at the same time that they are representative men and women. This doesn’t mean that America is a nation of eccentrics. It means that American writers--those who work the grand vein of letters in this country--like to leave no terrain unclaimed. Walt Whitman wrote: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.” Every nation, every epoch, has had its Americans, Whitman says: You can tell the writers among them by their encyclopedic souls, even if they often look like cranks.

Whitman comes to mind while reading “PrairyErth (a deep map),” the new book about Kansas by William Least Heat-Moon, author of the best-selling “Blue Highways.” Melville and Emerson come to mind too. There is a spiritual transcendence and egotistical largesse, not to mention unstinted research, in “PrairyErth” that will seem familiar to readers at home in the mid-19th-Century American classics. But the writer among that tribe whom Heat-Moon most resembles is Thoreau. Not Thoreau of the “Journals” or “Walden,” not the naturalist or civic philosopher, but Thoreau as he appeared in the eyes of his countrymen--a half-cracked, solitary, socially impracticable figure who found himself a home in the woods, no doubt to the everlasting amusement of his neighbors. Little did they know what lay behind Thoreau’s meanderings.

In “PrairyErth,” William Least Heat-Moon, quoting local opinion, calls himself “half a bubble off plumb.” He has a number of names for himself in this book, all self-mocking, and yet all slyly celebratory. He is a “two-bit mystic,” an “inspector of the ordinary,” a “grousing neoprimitivist.” He takes some pride in his capacity to mingle with the plain-spoken residents of Chase County, Kansas--the place at the heart of “PrairyErth”--and yet he is just as proud of Chase County’s suspicion. To be half a bubble off plumb, by local reckoning, is to be about dead level to William Least Heat-Moon. That is one way he distinguishes himself from the ordinary folk he calls “thoroughfare readers” and “two-dimensional Rand McNally travelers.” Like “Blue Highways,” Heat-Moon’s book about his wanderings around America’s “PrairyErth” is a story about America’s side roads. But this time Heat-Moon stays within the borders of a single county, a county where, predictably, he finds plenty of dimensions invisible to ordinary travelers.

Chase County, Kansas, the subject of “PrairyErth,” lies about halfway between Topeka and Wichita, in the midst of the Flint Hills, a region of rolling topography, ranches and native prairie grasses. From a national perspective--on the trivializing level of news, that is--the most interesting thing that ever happened there happened in 1931, when Knute Rockne died in a plane crash not far from the little town of Bazaar.

Chase County is the kind of place where when the wind dies down and the grasses fall still, the silence seems to echo overhead, and a writer, seated on the prairie, taking notes, is likely to write “good god, I’m the only thing happening here.” Heat-Moon spent six years happening in the county, following his nose, hunting up the small stories that are the life of rural living. They turn out in the end not to be so small.

The strength of “PrairyErth” is that of the people the reader sees, sometimes clearly, sometimes only dimly, through its pages. Some are settlers, some their descendants; some worked on the railroad, some worked cattle; one even ran a feminist town cafe in red-meat country. Some of the people who appear in “PrairyErth” belong to the public history of Chase County, and of America, but most belong now to the private, and largely vanished, memory of individuals. They are extraordinary people, like the young man who wrote in 1839, “Haveing (sic) nothing else to do, I set fire to the Prairies.”

It is impossible to talk for long about “PrairyErth” without talking about its method, its structure. (“The subject of this chapter,” Heat-Moon writes at one point, “is really its method.” “PrairyErth” is the work of an encyclopedist without an alphabet. It is arranged geographically, quadrant by quadrant, around the county, “my arbitrary pattern . . . that of a Japanese reading a book, up to down, right to left.” The grid that Heat-Moon imagines for his book is part actual, part imaginary--it corresponds to the 12 U.S. Geological Survey maps that cover the center of the county, and it resembles the grid that “an archeologist lays over ground he will excavate. Wasn’t I a kind of digger of shards?”

The result is a peculiarly 19th-Century work. “PrairyErth” is a kind of county ana, a compilation of remarkable facts and stories that thread their way, non-sequentially, back in time. Each quadrant of the book begins with a large number of quotations taken from Heat-Moon’s commonplace book--a device that resembles the section of extracts that opens “Moby Dick.” At times Heat-Moon is more compiler than author; the chapter called “Toward a Kaw Hornbook,” for instance, is nothing but a collection of quotations.

Often, the results of Heat-Moon’s compulsive squirreling are wonderful. Two examples come to mind. At one point he wonders what the old settlers’ wagons, the prairie schooners, used to hold, so he provides us with a list, taken from an inventory made after the death of a settler who died intestate. Later in the book, transcribing from a four-volume work called “Chase County Historical Sketches,” which might well have been the subtitle for his own work, Heat-Moon compiles “details that seemed to compose themselves into a man, a woman”:

“homesick much of the time until he met her (once walked back to Illinois to see the folks) and when the food ran out their first spring together went on foot to Fort Leavenworth 150 miles and back with a bag of flour on his shoulder and hoping it wouldn’t rain . . . those first years ate side-meat squirrel buffalo salted-prairie-chicken-breasts quail turkey biscuits cornbread vinegar-and-sheep-sorrel pie wild plums and grapes gooseberries never any coffee and instead brewed parched corn and the only condiment vinegar sauce and the only sweetening sorghum molasses.”

“PrairyErth” is a rich and revealing work, but it is also full of problems, one of which is its structure. Every chapter reads like a fresh beginning, a reopening of the subject, and in a book as long as this very long one, that is a trial for the reader. Heat-Moon starts narratives like hares: They spring from every bush and then to ground almost as suddenly. He has a gift for storytelling, but he likes to let it languish. He has other fish to fry.

You can crack “PrairyErth” at almost any page and find something worth reading, but it feels much less profitable to approach it as a “thoroughfare reader” intent on getting somewhere. Six years--the length of time Heat-Moon spent in Chase County--would be about long enough for reading “PrairyErth.”

In the end, there is nowhere to get to, except a witless final chapter, for Heat-Moon’s idea of structure simply voids the notion of a greater narrative rhythm.

“PrairyErth” is filled with the detritus of its composition, and its true model, as Heat-Moon several times suggests, is “Tristram Shandy.” Any chapter might have begun this book, and any chapter might have ended it.

But the biggest problem with “PrairyErth” is the author himself. The Flint Hills of Kansas may be his ocean, but he is his own Ahab and his own whale and his own Ishmael to boot. Heat-Moon is the master of ceremonies, Mr. Interlocutor, prankster, pundit and pedagogue. He has a riposte for everyone; his is the quest, theirs the supporting role.

When he listens, Chase County, Kansas, comes to life, and the air is full of the sound of meadowlarks. When he speaks, all the other voices--the true voices of Kansas--fall silent.