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Good Letters

20100901-my-hometown-and-yours-by-caroline-langstonDear Good Letters community,

You know, sometimes you just have to phone it in. I’m sitting here on a hot sunny day in Jackson, Mississippi on vacation at my brother’s, and am just about to visit my hometown of Yazoo City for the first time in three years.

I anticipate that there will be a lot to write about that encounter—it’s the first time my six-year-old son will have seen my childhood home, or that our family, together, will have strewn flowers over my father’s grave. We will drive into the Delta and my Yankee children will see rows of cotton lapping past the car for the very first time.

I’ll look forward to describing our adventures in the coming weeks. For now, though, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite books about hometowns and their strange and critical presence in American life.

I pitched this to NPR awhile back, but they were in the process of ditching their Three Books segment for a series on thrillers.

So instead I offer them to you. Here are three entertaining, fast-read summer books in which the real subject is not the narrator or characters, but the sense of love, loyalty, and identity toward a hometown, either native-born or adopted. Each of these books is a passionate embodiment of, to use Faulkner’s phrase, a “postage stamp” of land.

And they are vivid examples of how our hometown communities are the basic building blocks of American public life.

The books (all of which are in print):

Waterloo, by Karen Olsson

Karen Olsson’s Waterloo is a sprawling, funny portrait of the wide-ranging social strata of the city she’s named Waterloo, but which everyone else will know as Austin, TX—the college professors, state employees, and musicians, and the high-tech gurus and suburban conservative politicians who others fear are making a lazy, hippie backwater into somewhere too slick and too fast.

With the action taking place in the wake of the death of a venerable old “Southern liberal” senator, the novel focuses on loveable Nick, a mellow but melancholy reporter for the local free weekly, who sees all his old music haunts closing down around him, and Andrea Carter, an East-Coast-bred African-American reporter for the town’s major newspaper who has Waterloo roots, but who is struggling to understand the city’s racial history and to find her place in it. Wonderful portrayals of state politics, the music scene, and the city’s demographic development—all what you’d expect from journalist Olsson, who’s reported for Texas Monthly and the Texas Observer.

Holy Land, by D.J. Waldie

Writer D.J. Waldie could be called the holy monk of Southern California suburbia. A public information officer for more than thirty years for the lower-middle class Los Angeles suburb Lakewood, Waldie grew up and Lakewood and stayed there even after getting an MFA and starting to write for publications like the Los Angeles Times and the late, highly-regarded LA magazine Buzz.

He began Holy Land as a project to capture the history and development of a suburb that might simply be glossed over. In a series of spare, poetic evocations and photographs, he humanizes the developers of the town (Jewish builders who could not even live back then in the covenanted subdivisions they were building), the street grid of tiny stucco houses, and the spiritual and emotional lives of the hopeful families who bought them.

The book hallows all of the lives it depicts, and is a testament to Waldie’s own stolidity and faith, as he remains in the same house where he’s lived all his life.

The Ladies’ Auxiliary, by Tova Mirvis

Lastly, a smaller hometown can exist within a larger one. Tova Mirvis’ The Ladies Auxiliary centers on what some might consider a cultural anomaly: the tightly-knit Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis, TN.

Narrated in the collective voice of the synagogue’s eponymous “ladies’auxiliary,” the novel poignantly and yet amusingly outlines a full range of women who are dedicated to living lives of halacha while being perfect Southern ladies and hostesses.

The action of the novel centers around what happens when a stranger—Batsheva, a widowed convert to Judaism with a young daughter—arrives in the community and wants to be accepted into the family. Batsheva represents a challenge to how these ladies view themselves and their faith, and how they can preserve custom and tradition while being open to the possibility that this new arrival represents. How will they respond? It’s the dilemma that every community faces.

All of these books are brilliantly funny and beautifully written. And each made me cry, and kiss the cover when I finished reading.

Is there a book about your hometown that you would recommend? Use the comment boxes below to recommend your favorite books that we can attack during the waning hot weeks of summer!

Rest and enjoy, y’all. And I will look forward to being back among you in the deepening fall of September.

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