small town

Wingshooters

brittany — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By the age of nine, Michelle LeBeau has already taken more than a few knocks. Her mom has disappeared—whereabouts unknown—and her dad has unceremoniously dumped her with his aging parents in tiny Deerhorn, Wisconsin and left town. Michelle is Deerhorn's first biracial resident—half Japanese, half white—and she is not allowed to forget it.

Her only friends are a loving spaniel and her grandparents, a charismatic retiree named Charlie, and his dutiful wife, Helen. At best, the kids in town are standoffish; at worst, they're violent and mean, treating Michelle like an inferior mongrel.

Perhaps that's why she turns to adults for friendship. From her first days in Deerhorn, Michelle has gravitated toward Charlie, a real man's man, more comfortable hunting, fishing, and shooting the breeze than attending to the emotional needs of a scared little girl. Yet somehow the two bond and while both benefit from the liaison, Charlie makes no bones about his belief that people should stick to their "own kind." At the same time, his unconditional affection for the child is clear to everyone.

Life in Deerhorn settles into a calm, though tense, stasis—at least until Betty and Joe Garrett move to town, she to work in a local clinic, he to fill in for a teacher on maternity leave. The problem? The Garretts are African American.

Although the action of Wingshooters takes place in 1974, Deerhorn seems untouched by either the civil rights or anti-war movements. Residents are perplexed—and angered—by the changes that have taken place in the body politic over the last decade. Among the unsettling events: Legalized abortion and LGBTQ Pride rallies in nearby Madison and Milwaukee. They're further befuddled by media commentators who posit people of color as the moral and intellectual equivalent of whites.

To say that Deerhorn isn't ready for the Garretts is a gross understatement and residents do everything in their power to make the newcomers feel unwelcome. Even the Catholic priest does his bit, preaching against integration and racial equality.

It's ugly stuff. And it escalates when Joe Garrett accidentally discovers bruises on one of his students. Indeed, when a prime mover-and-shaker in Deerhorn—Charlie's best friend Earl—comes under scrutiny for child abuse, many of the town's most prominent denizens scurry to defend him. What ensues can only be described as tragic, a near-epic battle between good and evil.

Along the way, Revoyr addresses multiple themes, from masculinity, to women's roles, to the meaning of loyalty. They're concepts Revoyr has mined before—in The Age of Dreaming and Southland—but never with such passion.

Wingshooters chronicles the events of one particularly tumultuous year, but more than anything else, this is a novel about love, a touching, emotionally-explosive assessment of the relationship between one child and one elder. A fresh take on the politics of family ties, it eschews easy answers as it reveals the complex web binding granddad and granddaughter.

Michelle's conclusion, articulated as an adult, is insightful: "He taught me how to punch, how to block incoming blows, how to throw rocks back with accuracy and strength. These lessons made my life easier, and the irony strikes me only now: it was my grandfather, the rural, prejudiced white man... who taught me how to survive as a child of color in America."

Wingshooters is a story with jagged edges that lets readers decide if some sins—like racism—are simply too heinous to ever be completely forgiven. It's a heartbreakingly beautiful book by an astute political novelist. Read it with tissues in hand.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, March 12th 2011

Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Lyn C. Macgregor

Cornell University Press

I am really worried about Viroqua, Wisconsin. Not because Lyn C. Macgregor made it the subject of a two-year community study, which she writes about in Habits of the Heartland, but because in a footnote on page forty-eight she mentions that the Utne Reader had an article about the town as a good place to live. In the age of the Internet, attractive places to live do not stay secret long. Combined with the commodification of lifestyle, the publicity can change the character of a locality. I date the demise of my own Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, to gentrification from a recommendation of that same publication that it was a hip place to live. Good luck, Viroqua!

Like the majority of United States residents, I do not live in the country or a small rural town—and my experience with small towns was the romance of “going to town” while vacationing on my grandparents' farm in Jasper County, Illinois. The names of nearby towns—Oblong, Robinson, Paris—recall adventure and mysteries of the beyond—that famous cities do not conjure up.

In Habits of the Heartland, Macgregor jumps right in to address a common claim about small town life, that everyone knows your business. Well, she says, it's true. The clerk at the optician's knew that she had been pulled over for not having a current registration ticket on her plate. It turned out that the clerk was also a member of the ambulance squad and had heard about the incident on the police scanner.

Macgregor reveals her sociological findings right away. She sees not just one but three social groups in Viroqua: the Alternatives, anchored by a Waldorf school; the Main Streeters, active in preservation of the buildings on Main Street and in mitigating the effects of a Wal-Mart on its businesses; and the Regulars, who just want to live there. She introduces these subgroups by recounting how each of them celebrate Halloween, a vibrant explication of their different folkways and values. She then devotes a chapter to each of these groups and concludes Part I with her view of their interactions. In Part II, she slices her research a different way, in terms of civic engagement, retailing, and consumption. Esoteric but still readable comments about her methodology and the place of her study in the sociology of small towns are relegated to an appendix at the end of the book.

Why does an ordinary reader crack open a sociology book? For me, sociology casts a cool eye on one's life lived with others. Macgregor's glance is kind and her accounts gleam with lived experience. She refers to Herbert Gans's Urban Villagers in her appendix. Reading Gans as a young woman, I discovered some of my Italian-American father's quirks were not unique to him but were common in the immigrant Italian communities who settled in the United States.

Macgregor's work, too, gave me an insight about my own counterculture politics. Her argument that people think very differently about community and whether and how it can be made. The vulnerability in this alternative, outside-the-system politics is the potential for isolation from the larger society. Active in a community-supported agriculture group—Viroqua, like Brooklyn, has a lot of them—I bristle when people call this foods movement elitist. Macgregor’s comment, “The Alternatives were proud of all they had accomplished in Viroqua, and this pride made them feel that their deliberately made community was distinctly superior to other organizations and people in town,” stopped me cold. Even alternative communities become just another “gated community” unless they are open to the outside world. Not bad for a book about one small town.

Written by: Frances Chapman, July 17th 2010

Get Low

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Aaron Schneider

Sony Pictures Classics

Robert Duvall. Sissy Spacek. Bill Murray. If that’s not an easy sell, I’m not entirely sure what film would be. As expected, the acting in Get Low is phenomenal across the board. Even up and comer Lucas Black more than holds his own with these legends. The acting is the magic the movie tries so hard to make. Unfortunately, the allure of the fanciful southern folktale misses the mark. There are magic moments but Get Low fails to sustain itself consistently. Even so, it is a great pleasure to see these actors at work and tell this moral laden fable.

Robert Duvall plays an infamous town recluse, Felix Bush; Sissy Spacek plays his love of times gone by, and Bill Murray plays a funeral director. The premise is shockingly simple: the entire story centers on a funeral—only, it is for the still living Mr. Bush. If that were not strange enough, the funeral itself is no ordinary affair. In lieu of somber speeches and tears, there is an enormous party, with a raffle no less. But most surprising to me is that this film is based on a true story. A man by the name of Felix “Bush” Breazeale convinced counties of people to come to his “funeral party” by raffling off his property for next to nothing. The curiosity alone is appealing but the film presents a story the wider world needed to hear for its message on greed, love, and real life in the small town South.

Though all of these perspectives are intriguing, I somehow keep focusing on the fact that the film is couched as a folktale when really it is much more of an nontraditional love story. The intriguing part of this film is the dimension of older people in love. What would be so wrong with saying that? Is our world still that stuck in the traditional model of attractive, youthful happily ever after? Are we just not ready to think of the love lives of older people—beyond The Notebook in which we see their love mature from their youth? I think the answer to all those questions is yes.

The advertisers probably rightfully chose not to focus on this key aspect as for many audiences, it is not a major selling point. But as a feminist and someone critical of society’s scope of love, I think it is one of the most important reasons to go out and support this film.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, May 6th 2010

Under the Dome

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Stephen King

Scribner

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had an interest in things that go bump in the night–the unknown and the unexplainable. So, it was only natural that I would discover Stephen King. I’ve only read a quarter of the eighty or so books he has written, but I’ve always considered myself a King fan. One of my favorite books is The Stand, written in 1978 under the classification of what I consider to be “classic King” (pre-car accident and pre-Tommyknockers).

When I discovered Under the Dome was coming out, and that it was over 1,000 pages long, I looked forward to an epic with a good story and strong, interesting female characters. I wasn’t disappointed. Yet be forewarned: this isn’t classic King, but it’s one hell of a read.

King lives in Maine, so many of his stories center around a small town in the state with many “issues.” [Under the Dome[(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439148503?ie=UTF8&tag=feminrevie-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1439148503) begins when Chester Mills finds itself literally under a dome. (Imagine being trapped in one of those snow shakers, and you will understand the desperation that begins to implode within the town.) King is a pro at describing how people slowly become unglued in the midst of a crisis or disaster. Yes, you can sense the exaggeration, but you also feel a certain eeriness when you realize someone could act that way if pushed to his or her moral and emotional limits. King's work can be quite graphic, but that didn’t stop me from reading.

The basic story hearkens of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I thought King’s inspiration must have been the hellish nightmare that was the Superdome where many residents of New Orleans tried to escape from the floods. I was surprised to learn King actually started writing this book back in the '70s. The actual dome is quite interesting, particularly when it begins to get dirty and the sky looks like something you's see through foggy glasses. The stars, weather, and the water are all affected by being trapped inside this insular shape.

King is a master at crafting evil characters, the slimiest and most disgusting people you would never care to meet. In this story, we get to spend many pages with Jim Rennie, the Second Selectman of Chester Mills whose every action is justified by being for the “good of the town.” The dome is probably the best thing to happen to the Selectman, and he uses every opportunity to move things in his morbid and sordid direction.

I was pleased that Under the Dome has several strong female leads. One is Julia Shumway, the editor of the town newspaper. The town is cut off from the rest of the world, but Shumway risks her life to ensure that the news gets out daily to the people of Chester Mills.

Although one wonders what the dome is, how it got there, and if it would ever disappear as magically as it appeared, the unrest of the townspeople is the real story in Under the Dome. The lengthy narrative takes place over a short period of time, starting off strong and not letting you come up for breath until the very end. If you dare take the risk, it’s a great read.

Written by: Su Lin Mangan, January 18th 2010