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Home Town
By Tracy Kidder
Reviewed by Oona Patrick
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I have to admit I was glad to read that. I was struggling to write about my own hometown when I read Tracy Kidder's comments about his latest book in The Atlantic Monthly. So why is writing about a town so difficult? I still don't know exactly why, but Kidder's Home Town gave me some more reasons to be worried.
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 Home Town By Tracy Kidder Hardcover - $ 18.17 Published May 1999 Random House |
Home Town consists of a few distinct narratives woven together. Each covers a couple of years, or less, in the life of a resident of Northampton, Massachusetts. The most developed story is that of the native police officer Tommy O'Connor. The other stories include an informant, a lawyer, a single mother, a judge and a stripper. (I was surprised that Kidder did not follow anyone from the lesbian population of Northampton.) In the book's forward, Kidder presents the classic wide-angle view before he narrows down from general to specific. It ends with this paragraph:
From the summit, the corn fields are a dream of perfect order, and the town seems entirely coherent, self-contained, a place where a person might live a whole life and consider it complete, a tiny civilization all its own. Forget the messiness of years and days – every work of human artifice has a proper viewing distance. The town below fits into the palm of your hand. Shake it and it snows.That a town could end up thwarting a writer like this just increases my respect for little old towns and all the bones they hold. At first I thought that the phrase "a dream of perfect order" meant that Kidder was calling up our ideals of small town American life in order to question and reevaluate them later on. "Shake it and it snows," he says. It's so fake, so manageable, the whole idea – it's a toy. Go ahead and smash it. But Kidder doesn't confront those old idyllic myths directly enough to suit me. Once or twice in the book he seems to fall into the trap himself: "There was, one had to admit, a certain harmony in Northampton." There's even a rather dull chapter on the "incorruptible" mayor, whose story reads like cleaned-up meeting minutes, with all the acrimony reduced to a few dry notes.
Despite some brief tales of Northampton's earlier residents, Kidder returns again and again to the lives of the current residents and depends on those stories for structure. I was reminded of Kidder's description of the town's abandoned mental hospital, "It was a haunted spot, the kind that makes you feel how small a piece of time the living occupy." Perhaps Kidder can't help favoring the present, but those lives are not enough to define the image of the town. It is not depth of detail that is lacking, but scope of time.
The judge's story was shorter but more interesting to me than the others. His family had lived in town for four generations, and somehow I felt he knew more than any of the rest but told much less. "And when people erupt over big local issues, or a local person's travails make it into the papers and the mouths of gossips shine on the street corners, then, at those times above all, he can see the long view." Kidder needed the judge's long view, the ability to determine who and what will be important to Northampton 20 or 50 years from now. Just as it is with local issues, some of the characters he followed may matter to Northampton in the future; others may not. So while I found the stripper's story annoying and tedious (she just can't help herself; she just can't stop stripping for a living), it might be that in 20 years she'll be mayor.
I had a number of expectations going into this book that were not fulfilled: I expected Kidder to more directly reexamine persistent myths about American small towns, to scrupulously avoid Norman Rockwell scenes, and to put forth through either narrative or language a lasting, vivid impression of a place. So while Home Town is a satisfying story of a few lives, it is not a satisfying portrait of a town.
But boy, do I sympathize.
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Oona Patrick is taking a semester off from the MFA program at Bennington College. She grew up in a small town on Cape Cod where her father's family has been holed up for a couple generations. She writes about it whenever she gets up enough nerve.