We’re Not in Winesburg Anymore: On the Literature of the Small Town

It’s disorienting, and also thrilling, when the novel you’ve been writing over the course of several years, a book you know better than anyone, goes out into the world to be compared and categorized. And it’s probably inevitable that if your book is set in a small town and takes on multiple perspectives it will be compared to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It’s one of those books I’d always heard of but had no interest in reading. It sounded dull and worn-out, a bit priggish or maybe folksy, like Prairie Home Companion, which was not at all what I was after in my own writing.

And yet there it was, not just in my publisher’s initial description of my novel but in my first blurb. Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio. Did anyone even read that book anymore?

They do, it turns out, and plenty of people continue to write about it, and as so often happens with the classics, once I finally read it myself I discovered it was much more complicated—in this case weirder and less wholesome—than I’d been led to expect. Winesburg, Ohio is a dark and strange book; it doesn’t follow any of the rules of craft as we know it, and its characters are all, by Anderson’s own estimation, “grotesques,” driven by secret yearnings and suppressed sexuality.

I had my doubts about spending time with these people in their sad, insular place, until about halfway through, when I brought out my pencil and started flagging things to reread later—lightly and erasable, of course, since it was a library book. In the end I found enough lines and passages I wanted to keep, so many blunt and sometimes contradictory statements about truth and beauty and human nature, that I went ahead and got a copy of my own.

Also true about many classics is that nothing else is quite like it. The frequent comparisons to Winesburg are more just a way to align something new with something canonical, and to point out a few shared characteristics: in this case, a small, seemingly inconsequential place as setting; many points of view; and a fascination with the thoughts and motivations hiding beneath the surface. And in these ways, yes, you could say Liquid, Fragile, Perishable follows in the tradition of Winesburg, Ohio, and I don’t mind the comparison one bit.

Only about twenty percent of people in the United States live in non-urbanized settings anymore, and these places are often written off as provincial and inferior, especially by those who live there. But once I accepted that my novel would be categorized as “small-town fiction,” I sought other, more recent books that, by dint of setting and multiple points of view, might also come under this label.

And in reading them I came to the conclusion that small towns are ideal for observing the varieties of human experience that on the surface might seem like not much variety at all. Also, it doesn’t take a coincidence for people in small towns to be connected to one another, and they’ll always be haunted by the layers of history, the stories that have gathered around them and their families.

As I read more small-town fiction, I found one other characteristic that the best of these has in common: their ability to move beyond the subject of people. A small-town setting is particularly well positioned, by proximity to the natural world, the weather, the birds, the rocks and sky, to get past what humans have built. Given the damage a human-centric vision has brought to this shared planet of ours, I’m more and more interested in the nonhuman element in fiction, even if it’s just momentary, and even if it’s the human interest that gets me there.

Here are five books that, with their small-town settings and multiple points of view, could be placed in the tradition of Winesburg, Ohio—and yet, like my own, are nothing like Anderson’s at all.

*

Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

Though her uncategorizable writing is more often associated with Hans Christian than with Sherwood, Kathryn Davis brings all the elements of small-town fiction to her sixth novel, as she playfully presents the bare facts of the town’s police log, the local gripes and gossip, the sensuality of the weather and the nearby lake, and her characters’ inevitable interconnectedness. It’s a marvelously agile book, graced with an omniscient voice that just as easily moves in close to a young girl preening for a pageant as it does to a pack of dogs out for a delicious morning romp with the neighbors’ chickens.

The book also takes the long view, to the four glaciers that covered this town in a time before people, how beautiful it must have been, and how beautiful it will be after people. And as the title implies, there’s very little dividing one world from the other: the living from the dead, the human from the nonhuman.

Which is not to say that the present-day scenes of the book—in the Crockett Home for the Aged, in kitchens and the school auditorium—or the origin stories and preoccupations of her characters, are just backdrop for the book’s metaphysical leanings. Every moment is invested with meticulous noticing, fascination, even affection.

The small New England town of Varennes provides just the right setting for the author to track the movements of a mother beaver, the bacillus she harbors, the handsome young trapper sent to kill her, the shy girl whose knees weaken at his hazel-eyed glance, and the holy holy holy incantations they all share at the town’s church service.

Linda Legarde Grover, A Song over Miskwaa Rapids

Linda Legarde Grover’s latest novel, set in the fictional Mozhay Point Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, also bears all the hallmarks of small-town fiction, with its layered interpersonal connections, its inescapably present past, and its multiple points of view—including, briefly, a zoom out to the robin who opens and closes the book with his morning song, opiichii, opiichii niin!, starting the new day with his song of “everything that has ever happened.”

On the surface, the book concerns the legal maneuverings around an allotment of land that the tribal government is hoping to purchase from Margie Robineau, who has become deeply attached to the place over the course of her youthful friendships, loveships, and marriage, and has no interest in selling. Hidden beneath the present but concerning these same people, this same land, is a story from half a century earlier, which occupies the center of the book.

Adding yet another dimension are several deceased ancestors—far more gossipy than ghostly—who pull up their lawn chairs and watch over the place. They bicker over the coffee, offer prayers to the Creator, and devise a simple scheme to uncover an unsolved mystery and disrupt the course of events. A dark history of betrayals and losses is always close at hand, but so are the laughter and pleasure that these characters take in each other and in the land they love.

The past is not past, and it is especially unavoidable at the Miskwaa River and Mozhay Point, places Grover returns to frequently in her stories and novels, working these characters’ stories to the surface one by one, lifting them to the light and then burying them again.

Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation

Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky, Jenny Erpenbeck’s third novel fixes its view upon a piece of land on a Brandenburg lake, taking in a large swath of the brutal political forces of twentieth-century Germany through the stories of the people who come to stay there. Erpenbeck’s novels are more often situated in and around Berlin, but this one belongs on this list for the centrality of a single rural/small-town setting, its dedication to the interior lives of a series of characters who live in that place, and also for its darkness and originality.

It begins with a sweeping prologue that goes back twenty-four thousand years, then briefly spends time with a fairy-tale-like “wealthy farmer and his four daughters,” but most of the book concerns the occupants of the lake house and their silent gardener. The book gets its power from the immediacy and specificity of each character who stakes a claim to this place—including an architect and his wife, a family of Jewish textile manufacturers, soldiers of the Red Army, a series of householders, and a new generation of inheritors and visitors.

The one witness to it all is the nameless gardener who toils among the rocks and trees, moving, planting, and rearranging according to the instructions of each new occupant, but never leaving. The desires, sensations, and longings of each character play out in scenes of both beauty and horror, all against the backdrop of a place apart from the city and the powers that determine who is allowed to live, and where.

Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13

Each of the thirteen chapters in Jon McGregor’s fifth book of fiction spans a year in an English village, beginning with the winter a teenage girl has gone missing and spooling out through the cycle of seasons and small-town traditions, of intimacies and births and deaths. Its many characters—sheep farmers, schoolteachers, young friends, old widows—come in and out of view, along with the foxes, wood pigeons, and groundhogs who populate the village and its surrounding hills and woods.

McGregor offers just a small part of each story line before sliding into the next, often in the same paragraph and without hesitation, from love affairs to the tradition of well-dressing to the pheasants strutting through the beechwood, one after the other. They keep looking for the girl—Rebecca or Becky or Bex—but her absence grows fainter and more ghostly over time, even as she becomes more present in the town’s memory than many of the people who’ve lived there for decades.

Repetition, accumulation, and variation characterize this book as much as its small-town setting and its people. The effect often feels more like a musical composition than narrative fiction, and yet as time passes the various stories, human and nonhuman, gather momentum and depth through this repetitive cycling. People leave the village, new people come, but the beauty of the observations, their seeming triviality or even randomness, ultimately builds into an enchanting, revelatory portrait of a place, its seasons, and its people.

Crystal Wilkinson, The Birds of Opulence

Chapter titles like “Girls. Ducks. No Stars in the Sky. Mona & Yolanda” and “Sky, Blood, Bone, Breath. Lucy” hint at the weight and figurative power of the physical world, the place, of this novel, and the primacy of not one voice but many. This book moves in fluid leaps from 1962 to 1995 in the town of Opulence, Kentucky, and from one character to the next.

While the matrilineal progression from Minnie Mae to Tookie to Lucy to Yolanda fuels the stories and provides the thread that holds them together, they are not the only birds who get a chance to sing here; significant men connected by family and marriage, and women bound by profound friendships, also tell their side of the story.

As in Winesburg, Ohio, so much of the trauma, the yearning, and the secrets that drive the book are propelled by sex—the consequences, the fulfillment, but also the devastation it can bring and pass on over generations. Also central is a piece of land, the “homeplace,” as dense with stories as it is with weeds that need pulling, entangling squash vines, and creatures large and small. “This is y’all’s what-for,” says Minnie Mae to her sons. It’s “been up under your people’s feet since slave times.”

As in so much small-town fiction, the natural world is not found in a grand wilderness but in the fields and rivers, the labored-over gardens, and along the roads of the town itself, where everyone knows whose place is whose. It’s a place of entrapment but also of roots. The characters don’t always do right by each other, but Wilkinson won’t let you write anyone off; each is infused with a sense of the poet-storyteller’s generosity, forgiveness, and love.

______________________________

Liquid, Fragile, Perishable by Carolyn Kuebler is available via Melville House.