HOME FIRES BURNING
Robert Inman
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987.
392 pp., $17.95 (cloth)
Small-town America has never completely recovered from the beating it received at the hands of Sinclair Lewis in Main Street. Although that novel is little read today, it was all the rage in the 1920s, especially among dyspeptic intellectuals who lamented the cultural desolation of their homeland. Main Street soared to popularity on the strength of the decade's penchant for "debunking." H.L. Mencken and a host of lesser imitators slashed away at the American ethos, chortling among themselves as they revealed the clay feet of national heroes, exposed the tawdry underside of patriotic ideals, and demolished the verities cherished by Mencken's "booboisie."
For his part, Lewis transmogrified the idyllic, tree-shaded small town of the late nineteenth century into the provincial backwater of modern America. His heroine, Carol Kennicott, essays to bring the sweetness and light of refined culture to Gopher Prairie, but the town's boorish and hidebound denizens foil her attempts to drag them from the mire of backwardness. Carol's mission fails, but Sinclair Lewis' revenge on his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, succeeded: The term Main Street entered the lexicon as a trope for the stultifying drabness and hypocrisy of small-town life.
Lewis established his own journey from the darkness of Sauk Centre into the light of the City as the prototype for successive generations of young men and women struggling to escape the mindlessness of the provinces. In the standard version of the recurring tale, the sensitive, bookish lad fights to survive the brutishness of a small-town childhood. Come of age, he flees to the liberating milieu of the city (preferably New York, but Chicago, San Francisco, or even Atlanta will do), fulfills his imperious ambition to become a writer, and publishes a novel in which he settles old scores and redeems his suffering by ripping the veil from the hypocrisy, venality, and doltishness of the insensitive yokels back home in Jerkwater Falls. Reveling in the acclaim of his fellow sophisticates, he prides himself on his deracination and considers it a mark of honor that "you can't go home again," in Thomas Wolfe's familiar phrasing.
This archetypal journey may soon become passé, for it appears that the champions of the small town are transmogrifying Lewis' transmogrification. To wit: The small town has become chic. Of course, there was always a competing image to contest the sway of Main Street, namely, Our Town, Thornton Wilder's lachrymose version of the small town as the embodiment of down-to-earth folk wisdom. But that was New England, and the small town of that region has enjoyed a reputation as the deposit of rock-ribbed authenticity. The revival I refer to entails the celebration of the heartland, of the towns that dot the South and Midwest. As the cities become increasingly uninhabitable by all save the exceedingly rich, and as the dull, consumerist monotony of the suburbs palls, the small town is experiencing a renaissance. Spacious front porches, tree-lined streets, town squares, and neighborly ways are in vogue. Having tired of big-city cosmopolitanism, many Americans are rediscovering the joys of provincialism. Besides, the gentrification of the small town allows one to have it both ways: One can enjoy many of the amenities of urban life (even
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