It seems harder to write honestly about small towns than about other settings. A city in a novel can be dystopia, utopia, or mere backdrop; the country, the wilderness, can be simultaneously rich, threatening, alien, and homey. But with rare exceptions, the small town in contemporary literature is either a hell to escape from or a heaven to return to. The default lenses, long in place, are Dandelion Wine and Winesburg, Ohio.
This bias is not only literary; it has become a part of how those of us who grew up in such places make sense of our experiences. When we talk about the place where we were raised, my sister and I unconsciously illustrate this split. Her memories are pastoral and nostalgic. People worked hard; there was optimism in the air, a sense of community. I remember feeling this way in my earliest childhood; after about age ten, what I mostly remember about the place is how angry people were. I remember a vast peevishness and spitefulness, people swerving their cars “jokingly” at pedestrians and forcing joggers (me) into ditches and throwing their trash at you through the window, conversations that consisted mostly of epithets. I remember—as observer, participant, and victim—a culture of bullying, hazing, and sexual harassment so pervasive that you could not precisely demarcate these activities from normal behavior. And I remember the bizarre, asymmetric rage, the kind of rage that, if you wanted to dignify it, you could compare to the epic snits of Greek mythology. But I don’t want to dignify it. One night, a coworker casually threatened to kill my father over some meaningless workplace dispute—my father was, if I remember correctly, the night janitor at the time, not an authority figure of any kind, nor particularly disliked. Well, that is arbitrary enough to be something Zeus might do, but let’s not call it epic.
You can catch a person at a bad time. The same is surely true of places. The divergence in childhood memories between my sister and me can be put down to differences in disposition, moral commitments, and ideology, but most of all to economic history. She graduated from high school a few years before the enactment in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement; I graduated a few years after. The town still boasted two largish employers when my sister went off to college; by the time I did, we were slowly losing both. Imagine a storm front moving quickly through a small place. Not until I moved to the soulless, inhuman, anonymous city, where I lived, at first, in neighborhoods that caused visiting friends from back home to shudder—though actually it was racism, plus secondhand memories of the crime-beset 1970s, that caused this reaction—did I finally feel able to conduct myself with the openness and friendliness that are supposed to mark small-town manners in particular.