Home Town FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this book, one of America's masters of nonfiction takes us home - into Hometown, U.S.A., the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, and into the extraordinary, and the ordinary, lives that people live there. As Tracy Kidder reveals how, beneath its amiable surface, a small town is a place of startling complexity, he also explores what it takes to make a modern small city a success story. Weaving together compelling stories of individual lives, delving into a rich and varied past, moving among all the levels of Northampton's social hierarchy, Kidder reveals the sheer abundance of life contained within a town's narrow boundaries. Does the kind of small town that many Americans came from and long for, still exist? Kidder says yes, although not quite in the form we may imagine. A book about civilization in microcosm, Home Town makes us marvel afresh at the wonder of individuality, creativity, and civic order - how a disparate group of individuals can find common cause and a code of values that transforms a place into a home. And this book makes you feel you live there.
SYNOPSIS
The bestselling author of The Soul of a New Machine , House , and Among Schoolchildren now shows us what life is like in small-town America today.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kristin Eliasberg
Tracy Kidder's Home Town, a detailed, well-researched chronicle of one year in Northampton, Mass., demonstrates that a story's being true does not necessarily make it interesting. The New England town that is Kidder's subject is fairly humdrum, enlivened though it is by the presence of Smith College and by a strong tradition of civic responsibility. But since Kidder's central character, Tommy O'Connor, is a police sergeant with narcotics training, and since O'Connor's closest friend, who is also on the force, is arrested and tried in the course of the book for sexually abusing his own daughter, there is plenty of human drama. Many of the stories are interesting, and Kidder conveys a strong sense of character in each of his portraits. In the end, though, the whole doesn't add up to enough: You leave the book knowing a lot more than you did before about life in Northampton but not having learned much about life.
Kidder speaks of "the genius of the place" -- the town itself functions as one of the characters -- and he includes brief, compassionate portraits of major citizens: the mayor, the morning DJ, a senior judge. One of his strongest is of Alan Scheinman, a middle-aged man with obsessive-compulsive disorder. When Kidder first introduces him, he is walking around with his limbs swathed in plastic bags; during the course of the year, he bravely conquers his disease, taking Prozac and becoming (somewhat) normal. But Kidder isn't entirely convincing when he tries to make the case that the kindliness and neighborliness of the Northamptonites make the town a haven for Scheinman. (Sometimes he seems to be describing a Yankee Mayberry RFD.)
It doesn't help that we aren't able to follow Scheinman's story chronologically. Kidder intersperses segments on the various characters somewhat randomly through the book, fleshing out the narrative with flashbacks, a few potted Northampton history lessons and occasional misty-eyed descriptions of the town and its denizens. We don't get to focus closely enough on any single patch of the broad tapestry to be rewarded with an in-depth story; nor is there enough sweep to provide a breathtaking panorama. The style presents additional problems. When Tommy O'Connor passes his former best friend and neither man acknowledges the other, presumably it's O'Connor who characterizes their encounter as "two ships in the night." But when the judge is described as "looking dapper" and walking "with a jaunty step" within the same sentence, the cliches just seem like authorial laziness.
Kidder's writing is informed by a general notion of goodness rising above adverse circumstances, but because he bounces from story to story without focusing on any particular issue, the narrative doesn't flow. (The sexual-abuse case picks things up early on, but then not much happens with it until well toward the end.) The character of Kidder himself doesn't provide a unifying factor, either. He is virtually absent from the book, occasionally to odd effect: Tommy O'Connor often seems to be talking to himself as he drives his cruiser.
Ultimately, the book resembles the town. It's nice, but it's not very exciting. -- Salon
Ben Yagoda - The New York Times Book Review
What binds Home Town...is a single character, a 33-year-old police sergeant and Hamp native named Tommy O'Connor....[Kidder] made the cop's story a river. The tributaries are historical and demographic digressions about Northampton, and small profiles of a half-dozen other characters....His smart and gently ironic writing is always good company.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times
...[W]hat is Mr. Kidder's point....Apparently it is to illustrate how the tolerance and cohesiveness of his town embraces all extremes....[He celebrates] the place's diversity....What his book succeeds in doing is bring the dots together again. The picture they form is far from pretty, but it certainly coheres. Shake it and it weeps.
Jennifer Langston
Tommy O'Connor is a cop in a town of freaks, feminists, activists, academics, drug dealers, fancy restaurants, wholesome fresh food markets, and colorful street preachers -- all living in what was once the classic American small town.
He grew up in Northampton, Mass., where the all-female Smith College was his playground. He enjoyed a blissful childhood, an Irish family steeped in storytelling and politics, and the firm belief that he would spend his entire life in the place he was born.
Over time, the dying Main Street he remembered was revitalized with art galleries, bookstores, ethnic cuisines, movie theaters. The town of 30,000 -- the same number of souls as in Plato's ideal city-state -- became a place where public officials, felons, and vegetarian anarchists share the same spaces.
Tracy Kidder, whose eye for uncovering drama in unlikely places won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine , explores just what makes a small town work. He leads a reader though the everyday details of his characters' lives, showing the kindnesses, dramas, and bizarre encounters that bind people to places.
Focusing on a half-dozen characters -- from the overworked mayor to a drug informant who teaches O'Connor the ropes -- Kidder uncovers more than a picture-perfect New England college town. There are drug deals, although they rarely turn violent. There are welfare mothers at Smith, struggling to convince themselves that they aren't stupid and that the college didn't make a mistake.
Home Town includes the eccentrics and homeless people, some of whom were released when the local mental hospital closed down. The most fascinating character is Alan Scheinman, a wealthy developer and rehabilitator of downtown buildings who develops an obsessive-compulsive disorder about cleanliness. But he finds helpmates -- from the clerks at the motor vehicle registry who agree not to "contaminate" his papers by touching them to a stripper who helps bring him back into the normal world.
O'Connor polices the town with tough love. Some days he relishes the circus, and civic-minded residents make police work easier. Other days he catches flak on the street for shaking down a known black drug dealer, because O'Connor is white.
He sees the town's full range -- from lesbians making love in the park to kids on the bubble of going bad. But like other mainstream residents of the town, he values tradition and order in his own life. He remains devoted to his father, his wife, Jean, and the idea of dressing up as Santa Claus and giving out toys at Christmas.
Over the course of the book he faces forks in his own life. He must decide whether to inform on his best childhood friend, a fellow cop who is accused of sexually molesting his daughter. And at the age of 33, he finds himself wondering whether to apply to the FBI, which would advance his career but take him far from home.
Through these characters -- their worries, victories, and everyday meanderings -- Kidder weaves a richly textured tale. With a skillful eye and a keen understanding of place, he also reveals how many different kinds of people can find home in one place.
Jennifer Langston is a reporter for a daily newspaper in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Sanford J. Unger
...Kidder does not claim to have looked for anything representative of a grand phenomenon....[H]e has sought merely to tell a good story in a way that teaches us something. That he has done. — WQ: The Wilson Quarterly
Read all 12 "From The Critics" >
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Tracy Kidder can turn the most unlikely story into a riveting drama. — Anne Tyler
Tracy Kidder tells us about a 'hometown,' yes, butalso about who we are as a people. Here is an American observer worthy of his predecessor, Mark Twain. — (Robert Coles, author of The Moral Intelligence of Children)
Tracy Kidder
"It's tempting to parody [Northampton], but it's too easy....What you see is pretty motley, but there is a solid mainstream, an almost invisible background to it....Without argument, a place begins to go dead....You've got to have this tension. You've got to find a way to let lots of different kinds of people in, and keep them there." — Interviewed in The New York Times, April 15, 1999
A diamond of a book...masterful. — Richard Price
Alex Kotlowitz
The stories in Home Town, so beautifully rendered, ultimately reveal the kindness and compassion that bind us, that nourish a community. It is a jewel of a book. — Author of There Are No Children Here and The Other Side of the River
Jonathan Harr
Rich with a sense of place, woven like a tapstry, animated by the lives within it...hilarious, at times painful, and altogether spellbinding. — Author of A Civil Action
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