7 Novels Starring American Small Towns

I'm feeling lucky: I've been reading novels. Luckily, in novels, no matter how much we empathize, and find ourselves beset by the forces around and in the story, the book ends. These days, even if I'm rereading a novel--which means the book starts again, then ends again--I'm okay. Luckily, I'm not a character in the books I'm reading, because some of the things that happen in those books, they're pretty bad, and some of those characters would be awful to meet; worse than the characters on TV, mostly, but not as bad as the characters in movies.

But what's the definition of "character" in fiction? I have a friend--a real person, not a character, not here, not yet, he's just a straw man--who says that anything with a name is a character, any person, animal, or thing. Others believe that any consciousness that acts within a story (some one or thing that makes its own decisions) is a character. Still others believe that they themselves are real people and not characters when they read, but hey, we won't tell them this is the internet, no one's real. Shhhhh. Or that the novel "happens" in the reader's head.

If you're reading a novel, you need characters, right? You need someone with whom to empathize--even if empathy is just a gateway drug to melodrama. With a character whose cares are yours, you feel better, worse, etc. Granted, looking for yourself in the book is kind of clinically askew, if not megalomaniacal, but really, it's just reading.

Now what if a place becomes as or more important than a character, a scene stealer of a landscape? What if a river runs through it? What if the fish is bigger than the man? Or a house with a bunch of gables: that's a symbol, right? Or a doorbell that's got a pull rope--the novel pulls the rope, the bell rings, and that's a symbol too. Ding, dong, boom.

What I'm trying to say here is that a novel is a site for our outsized feelings distilled into the actions of others, for symbolism, and for the kinds of decisions that move us but aren't and can't be ours. In a novel, a place--let's say a small American town--can be akin to a character, certainly a symbol, and the star of a star-studded show.

Luckily, novelists know this. A good novelist understands how my feelings associate--that is, my feelings find real time markers and symbols and sensations that become essential to making new memories. As a result, good novels give us memorable places to inhabit along with the characters whose identities tromp through those places. Realism? Not only.

So here's my riff on some places in some fine novels--by which I mean, this time, small towns in American fiction. Because the smaller the American town the more likely it will function as a character? That's a theory, one that I've tried to test in my latest novel of small town American life, The Committee on Town Happiness. With another theory, too: I've come to believe, by writing three novels about small towns, that in American fiction the small town serves as a crucible for democracy.

I'll begin by cheating--the game's adrift!--with three Southern novels in a row. Why is this cheating? Because the Southern Gothic presumes a town, not a national park or wilderness.

Honorable Mentions: Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor. The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter. Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor. Lake Wobegone Days, by Garrison Keillor and Mike Lynch.