Small-Town USA

Not because of the role it plays in some national mythology, not because of the values it embodies (it probably doesn’t embody them any better than lots of other places), and not because it makes the ethical life somehow realer. It is worth saving because people live there.

This is the very possibility that small towns are supposed to offer: a theater in which to contemplate more fully the impact of your single life, your choices.

The picture of a successful town presented here is of a place that has given up any hope of surviving without the patronage of people who live elsewhere, that is, in cities—where, presumably, actual things are still being made.

When we treat it as axiomatic that small towns have no use or place for such people, that if you have ever liked a French movie you had better just hurry to the nearest city, we forget that part of being a community is leaving room for the diversity of human nature.

But places aren’t tests. Indeed, one of the signs of a healthy community is that it’s robust enough to tolerate a little difference.

When a place rejects you, you never stop wondering whether it’s your fault; the whole memory becomes like a test you wish you could take again, now that you’ve finally studied for it.

It suggests something about the hollowing out of the American economy that, by the 1990s, even those living in actual cities had begun to make the story of the town we must leave behind their own. If you feel stifled by Chicago, that’s your fault.

Why does it now seem natural to us that a small place should stifle? For the same reason, I suspect, that the small town offers the possibility of knowing everyone, of seeing each social interaction and political choice whole from one end to the other, of making meaning. It is so easy to make the wrong meanings. The small town is a terrible place t... See more

it’s easier to list small towns in American art that serve as sites for the examination of pathology, hypocrisy, or the ways a soul is stifled, than towns that serve simply as neutral settings.