Hometown by Tracy Kidder
I’ve been trying to read more non-fiction lately. One of many reading goals I have. In fact, I didn’t realize just how many reading goals I have until I started writing about my reading.
1) Become more well-read. Read the classics and Pulitzer or Nobel prize winners.
2) Fill in gaps from childhood wasted on garbage books.
3) Read every book on my bookshelf before buying (too many) more books.
4) Read more non-fiction. Your degree was in history, remember?
Maybe my BA burned me out, but I’ve read hardly any history at all since I left school, and very little non-fiction. So I figured that by reading Tracy Kidder’s Hometown, I’d almost be accomplishing two goals with one try. Kidder’s a Pulitzer prize winning author, just not for this one.
Hands down, Kidder is darn fine at what he does. How, praytell, does an author take the most mundane and banal of topics, so trite that “Main Street, USA” is almost a synonym for vanilla, and make it a fascinating read?
This is another book I got from a clearinghouse and, being unfamiliar with Kidder’s work before this, and seeing as the copy I bought is some kind of advance copy without the usual marketing, I actually wondered if it was a novel that had been misplaced. Either Kidder takes great liberties with his subjects, which I don’t believe for a second, or he just has a *remarkable* gift for getting to the core of what his interviewees are hiding. The frankness he inspires makes for an entertaining, educational and, that favorite buzz-word of the literary critic, “fully-realized” work.
The titular Hometown is Northhampton, MA. And after living in New Hampshire for a year and a half, Massachusetts takes up a significant spot in my heart. I was on point to spot something wrong, and I never did find it. Kidder nails the “vibe” (oh dear, my California roots are showing) of the city perfectly, from the history to the new progressive movement. Out of the many reasons I enjoyed this book, that was the main one. Through my years of moving from state to state, I’ve learned that there are such sharp divisions between segments of our national culture, that sometimes we might as well be different countries. And I’m not talking about the red and the blue states, although, yes. I’m talking about my blue state of California and my blue state of New Hampshire. The Yankees and the Granolas. The Texans I lived with in my childhood, the Utahns of my college years, and the Seattlites of my teenagehood. Each group is so widely different even as they seem so similar to the rest of the world. And each group is completely ignorant of what makes them distinct. It’s not just the Midwesterners who think they’re the “real Americans.” We all do.
But Kidder picked up the distinctions and described them with clarity, while giving them the national context it deserved. So that while this does seem like the most apple-pie-and-baseball American town in the nation, you can still see the New England Yankee influence.
He treats class and ethnicity differences with the same understanding and journalistic, almost to the point of scientific, objectivity. For every eccentric millionaire in the book, there’s also a coke dealer. For every struggling but upwardly mobile single mother, there’s a police informant who’s luck is running out.
The only complaint I had about the book was that it emphasized my dissatisfaction with where I’m living. I’m sure Modesto is a lovely town and I’ve met some lovely people, but I long for that small town where everybody knows the police by name and talks to the mayor and belongs. Heck, Modesto probably is that town for a lot of people. Maybe if I stayed in one place for longer than a year I’d discover that for myself.
