Home Town

HOME TOWN by Tracy Kidder is a highly entertaining and compelling book where truth is indeed, stranger than fiction, and certainly more entertaining. Kidder writes about the sleepy town of Northampton, Massachusetts, a town that at first glance seems like any other typical small town. Its inhabitants are anything but. There's the local judge who sentences his neighbors, the millionaire with a devastating disorder, a single mother struggling to begin a new life who enrolls at Smith College, a likeable crack addict who works as a police informant, a cop who is accused of a terrible crime and vilified by the town, and holding it all together is life-long resident and detective, Tommy O'Connor, Northampton's paen to small town family life, and its moral glue. HOME TOWN examines what it's like to grow up and live your whole life in the same town and the trepditation that goes with leaving it, about wanting more than what life has to offer, and about loyalty and virtue. Although this is a work of nonfiction, it reads like a novel and is an extremely engaging story and an excellent book.

Tracy Kidder is the best non-fiction writer in America since John McPhee went off the deep end and became fixated on rocks. Kidder takes seemingly small subjects, in this case a nice little town in Massachusetts that works pretty well for most of the people who live there, and manages to tell us a great deal about a great many things: cops, friends, yearning for family, homelessness, a single woman's dreams and even obsessive-compulsive disorder. The writing seems effortless but only because the book is so well crafted. This is one of those books where you feel you have more life inside you simply for having read it. He manages to bring real people to life in a way that makes us truly care about what happens to them. A less talented writer might tell his or her publisher I want to spend a year watching what happens in a small town and the publisher might say forget about it. In Kidder's hands it works beautifully, as we've come to expect. I loved this book.

I could relate to this book so well, but then again, I grew up there!! Tracy Kidder describes this town to a tee. And he is very correct in saying that there is something about the town that doesn't let go, the view of Mt. Tom for instance. Even after you leave, there is always something that brings you back. I learned alot about the little old town, it just makes it that much more intriguing!!

Towns are towns. All of them have richer people and poorer people. All of them have newcomers and founding families. Northampton is no exception. Yes, Northampton may be atypical because of the presence of Smith College, but this atypicality is superficial. Northampton residents choose to get really bent out of shape about global stuff, while it could be argued that residents in most towns pay attention only to what is going on around them (and only part of that). The common principle here is that people tend to get distracted from what is really important and so, in that essential sense, Northampton is typical.I lived in Northampton briefly and for a longer time across the river in Amherst. During my summer in Northampton I worked at a deli in Florence. This place was frequently by residents of "the Hamp" as opposed to residents of "Noho" and I got a very clear idea of the friction that exists between these two camps. I would argue that this too is increasingly typical in American towns. In my own Hudson Valley home town, New Yorkers moved in and radically changed a very depressed part of Main Street into a swanky district full of boutiques, bakeries, antique shops. Did the old timers appreciate it? No.I have read all of Tracy Kidder's books except _Old Friends_. _Home Town_ has more anastamosing narrative threads than his previous books have and I believe that he has been very successful in this attempt to broaden the typical scope of his vision. Some of the characters in the book have nothing to do with each other or meet only glancingly, which is just like what it is like to live in a town of 30,000 people. No one is objectively extraneous, although they may be extraneous to your own life. The reader can not approach this book as if it were a Dickens or Eliot novel, wherein everyone's lives are densely interwoven. Kidder is describing actual life, not some contrived closed universe.Kidder as narrator is not present at all in this book. He is omniscient, but he is never distant. In this regard he reminds me of John McPhee. I love "New Journalism" (Tom Wolfe, P.J. O'Rourke etc.), but it is refreshing to read this more traditional kind of reporting when it is so well done. Toward the end of the book I was surprised to realize that I probably would not like the main character, Tommy O'Connor, if I met him in person, but Kidder presented him so completely and so sympathetically that I ended up respecting O'Connor, even if I, like the mayor and the judge, would feel a bit nervous having him as a town cop.If you have a home town, then I would be surprised if you didn't find it in this book.

Tracy Kidder continues his reign as a top writer of narrative non-fiction in 'Home Town', a book well worth reading for the engaging character portraits alone. Literature if full of stories of good and evil. In this book the good people, like father-of-the-protagonist Bill O'Connor, are charming, funny, and very good. Interestingly, most of the bad guys are at least a little bit good too. While other excellent authors have successfully built around dramatic events (Perfect Storm, Thin Air), Kidder crafted this story around a vibrant community, the people who make it work, and the people who test its limits. The book could just as easily have been set in Santa Fe, Charleston, or a thousand other interesting places. As one of the legion of Northampton expatriates who follow the community through the local paper's gazettenet.com, I have to admit that Kidder showed me parts of the town that I had missed in 25 years of living there and 15 years of watching from afar. News reports of horrible tragedies around our Nation focus us on places that have imploded in social disaster. 'Home Town' shows in contrast a community that is at least narrowly winning the struggle to achieve comity and civility...and have some fun.