Small Town America
I propose, in very broad terms, five literary landscapes.
There is wilderness, where the protagonists escape to or strike out for the unknown. The ensuing adventure revels in casting off the restraints of civilization. This is balanced against the visceral fear of the dangers a terra incognita might hold.
The countryside; wilderness tamed, the pioneer, the seasonal turning, the hard graft of wresting sustenance from the earth. The isolation and self-reliance. The building of a community.
The small town, a community small enough to enable, at the least the sense of, knowing all inhabitants. Self-contained, a sense of security closely coupled with conservatism. A great place to raise children. The kind of place for children to escape from. The natural home of gossip.
The suburb; the in-between world, the bedroom community with its commuters. This ambiguous state the breeding ground for ennui and existential crises.
The city; the ‘urban jungle’, in a sense the recreation of the conditions inherent in the wilderness. The individual amongst the multitude, providing a liberal environment that allows freedom and opportunity coupled with indifference and threat.
It’s fairly easy to know where to start with novels set in small town America. In a sense, at one time nearly all of America (in so far as settlers from Europe were concerned) was either small town or wilderness. Certainly, The Adventures of Tom Sawyerand Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain both play upon that, albeit in a nostalgic mode already endemic by the second half of the 19th century.
It’s such a deep seam running through American literature that the difficulty is trying to stop. Not just a deep but a wide seam. The effectiveness of works by contemporary authors as disparate as Stephen King, Marilynne Robinson, Kent Haruf and Gillian Flynn are in many ways reliant on their small town settings.
So, with that in mind, I’m offering thoughts on a handful of novels that over the years have stuck in my mind. They are also, with the exception of last, ones that are perhaps not that well known in the UK.
Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
In what is in effect a related series of short stories Anderson moves from one denizen of the fictional town of Winesburg to another. The stories are connected by the character of George Willard, whose own story is a coming of age one and ultimately an elegy to his life there as growing up takes him away from town.
Published in 1919, most of the stories were written 1915-16 and one can sense again a looking back, not only to a lost youth but lost way of life. This time frame and structure also relate to similar work in other formats, Edgar Lee Masters’ poem Spoon River Anthology published 1914 and the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder first performed in 1938 but set in 1901 to 1913.
It’s a seminal work of Modernism and one can see its influence especially in Hemingway.
Beyond that, one can see similarities in Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury’s novel of 1957, like Winesburg Ohio, is comprised of what are basically short stories. It also shares with it that element of nostalgia but in a much more pronounced personal and sentimental way.
It is the twelfth summer of Douglas Spaulding. Summer is presented as childhood’s natural season. In a town setting free from the labour a childhood on a farm would entail, it would seem at its outset to stretch ahead as an endless idyll. The opening chapter, set on the morning of the first day of summer, serves as an overview of the town and what might lay ahead for Douglas. The ensuing chapters are episodes, both mundane and fraught, involving Douglas’ friends, family and townsfolk. Of course, lessons are learned along the way.
The author is recreating his own childhood, looking back to a time, 1928, when perhaps a twelve year old would still be living in a child’s world. A time when that child’s world was lived largely separate from the adult one. This is, at least as Bradbury remembers it, in a safe, secure and comfortable 1920s small town. I must confess it is also as I remember my own 1950-60s childhood in an equally comfortable New York suburb.
In tandem with that innocence is a child’s sense of the possibility of magic. In the case of Dandelion Wine this magic is present in both in subtle and overt ways. This novel is often seen as a companion to Bradbury’s 1962 novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. The age of the protagonists and the small town setting are very similar but the fantastical element is much more to the fore. And it is so very much darker.
Dandelion Wine has a follow on in, Farewell Summer published 2006.
Dandelion Wine shares a similar tone and structure to Twain’s, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (please note, for those unaware, Twain’s novel contains the use of an offensive racial appellation) and like that is a book that can be successfully shared with a child of a similar age as the protagonist.
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Moving away from the nostalgic sense of the small town as a lost Eden is Russo’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2001 novel. The small town is now presented as a failed model and a trap. The kind of place people leave not just because their dreams and ambitions require a larger stage than a small town can provide but it’s now impossible to stay. It is, if it really ever was, no longer safe, secure and comfortable.
Empire Falls, Maine is a small town on the Knox River that owed its existence to now defunct industries. Miles Roby is the manager of the Empire Grill. He and the café are the centre of a tangled web of characters. There are secrets to be revealed and histories to be uncovered but this is basically a character driven novel and the interest is in what drives the characters. In a place where the sensible thing is to get out, those who remain are there for varied reasons. Is it inertia, a lack of imagination or a life too damaged? Roby had the opportunity to leave yet choose to stay.
Empire Falls possesses some intriguing parallels with Frank Capra’s 1945 film, It’s a Wonderful Life. Like Miles Roby, George Bailey is set to leave but stays because of family obligations. The film’s purpose is to show just how important George Bailey is to the town of Bedford Falls and, albeit in a more oblique way, Miles Roby is also important to Empire Falls.
The differences, however, are more telling. It’s the difference between 1945 and 2001. Capra’s fundamental optimism about America, his belief in the inherent goodness of the common man and the virtuous communities that small town America represented is hard, if not impossible, to maintain in the present day. Even Pottersville, the nightmare version of Bedford Falls, has more optimism and drive in its seedy corruption than Empire Falls can muster.
Written many years before Donald Trump’s accession to the White House, Empire Falls delineates the kind of place and situation that has moulded the mindset of many of his supporters. It would be worth a read just on that basis but equally worthwhile on the quality of the writing.
American Rust by Philip Mayer
Published 8 years after Empire Falls, Meyers novel moves the story of America’s small towns that bit further on. The western Pennsylvanian town of Buell, as most of the towns in that region, was dependent on the steel industry. (Think of the film The Deer Hunter for context) The collapse of that industry was devastating. And, as in Empire Falls, we are among those who are left. Survivors, but not those pulling away from the shipwreck in lifeboats but those who remained on deck and are now wondering why there’s water up to their knees.
Again, we have a protagonist, young Isaac English, who is set on fleeing. Again, the opportunity of further education elsewhere is key. Again, family duty intervenes. And yet again, that flight is frustrated.
He is torn between his desire to leave and his sense of obligation to care for his father. His best friend Billy Poe is also intent, maybe, in getting away. Their plans are scuppered in the most dramatic fashion.
Set in a ruined industrial landscape that reads as post-apocalyptic and amidst an uncaring, almost to the point of being inimical, natural world, the story has the feel of an ancient Greek tragedy. Meyers prose style in this novel bears some comparison to William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.
Again, like Empire Falls, this novel reads as a harbinger for the conditions that brought about the advent of a demagogic populist president. Although Pittsburgh was able to re-invent itself the surrounding region has remained mired in a disaster caused by a changing world, corporate short-sightedness and greed. A situation that developed thirty years ago and who a sizable number of people living with it are willing to believe against all evidence to the contrary the promises that the coal and steel industry will re-appear and their safe, secure and comfortable small towns re-emerge as if it was all some bad dream.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
In the Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge and its follow on, Olive Again, we come, in a sense, full circle. Like Winesburg Ohio and Dandelion Wine the novels are composed of related short stories. The eponymous Olive moves through them, sometimes the main focus, sometimes glimpsed in the background.
The coastal town of Crosby, Maine seems to have avoided, by and large, the fate of other American small towns. It exists in some kind of bubble and in that insular fashion common to small towns with just enough in-comers to fuel the gossip mill, which would appear to be Crosby’s main industry. It also possesses that small town penchant for accepting long time inhabitants eccentricities and foibles as part and parcel. And perhaps no one’s more so than Olive’s.
Olive, when we meet her, is still teaching maths at the junior high school (for those outside the States that’d be children generally between the ages of 12 and 15) and married to the local pharmacist. The stories and the viewpoint then shift around various characters and their situations with Olive sometimes involved and sometimes a bystander. Ultimately though, it’s all about the revealing of her character, to us and herself.
Olive is also possibly the most awkward and difficult person in town. Plain spoken to an almost malicious degree, she manages the trick of being sensitively empathetic and deliberately obtuse at the same time. She is a uniquely brilliant fictional creation.
Other of Strout’s books, all having that small town connection, do have more of a political and economic context than does Olive Kitteridge. Her novel 2017 Anything is Possible, the follow on to the previous year’s novella My Name is Lucy Barton, is again composed of short stories and set in the small town of Amgash, Illinois. While similarly to those in Olive Kitteridge, its characters are often oppressed by their secrets, one also gets the sense of their oppression by circumstances outside of their control.
Elizabeth Strout’s prose style and sensibility reminds me greatly of the Nobel Prize winning Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, whose work I would also highly recommend.