The Small Town Is Dead! Long Live the Small Town!

I knew, going in to read Jan Karon’s At Home in Mitford, that what Karon writes and what one of my favorite authors, Sinclair Lewis, wrote was going to clash. I was right.

Karon worships the small town, painting her characters as irascible misfits, artistes, the dedicated doctor, the troubled boy, the harried farmer/veterinarian, the priest who is the community’s glue, keeping everything, including the storyline, going. Only one character – a minor one, at that – is depicted as unsavory or annoying (the editor of the local newspaper, who is only mentioned because of the flubs he prints and his overeagerness for “hard” news). The character of Dooley Barlowe’s mother is also unsavory, but since she is mentioned only in passing, her characterization hardly counts.

Lewis is weary of the small town, painting his characters as smug, self-satisfied, prying, dull and – worst of all – reluctantly conformist who keep following their small-town ways because that’s the way it’s always been done. Lewis depicts only one of his characters in a savory manner – Miles Bjornstam, the town crank and critic who never gives in to the small-town mentality. His protagonist Carol is depicted sympathetically, but ultimately with Lewis’ most-hated characteristic – the conformist. Reluctant, yes, but a conformist nonetheless.

The truth of the small town is in the middle somewhere. Small towns aren’t as oppressive as Lewis’ Gopher Prarie, nor are they as idyllic as Karon’s Mitford. Small-town characters aren’t as colorless as Lewis’s Vergil Gunch, nor as vibrant as Karon’s Father Tim.

What both authors catch is the small-town susceptibility towards being condescending to outsiders. Lewis condemns it, while Karon seems to celebrate it (most vividly in describing the reluctance of the town’s grocery store to sell local corn to visitors because they’d overcook it).

I see this on a daily basis, as I live in a small town, population of just under 1,300. The dividing line between newcomer and old-timers is 1976, when the town was flooded after a federally-built dam on the Teton River burst. In this town, you’re either pre-flood or post-flood. Even people who moved to town 30 years ago feel this divide. Not that the divide bothers us. My wife and I are hermits. I’d live happily in the middle of nowhere if we had electricity and a good Internet connection; my wife likes being close to town just for the convenience of it.