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.

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

Publishers Weekly

Kidder (The Soul of the New Machine) applies his hands-on style of journalism to an examination of small-town America--specifically Northampton, Mass., home of Smith College--through assembling a group portrait of some of its everyday citizens. His central premise--"if you do all your growing up in the same small place, you don't shed identities, you accumulate them"--is chiefly demonstrated through the story of Tommy, a local cop. He's first seen as a mischievous teenage townie, an "exuberant youth" wooing his high school sweetheart, living in a white clapboard house. As Tommy grows into adulthood, Kidder shows his life becoming more complex, as when a childhood friend and fellow cop is suspected of child abuse. Because Kidder's writing style is so descriptive, it abridges easily into self-contained observational episodes, and reader Krall, though animated in his character depictions, preserves Kidder's overriding tone of earnestness. Based on the 1999 Random House hardcover. (May) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. Read all 11 "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