Something changed for me the day I walked into a certain crossroads country store on the way to my own country place in Wisconsin’s deeply rural Iowa County. I had long been both charmed and fascinated by the store’s existence in this remote, picturesque area of rolling cornfields and pasture along a ridge overlooking the wild terrain of Governor Dodge State Park. It’s a small, white clapboard building in need of paint, with a weatherbeaten sign in front that doesn’t exactly beckon to passersby. Still, I had always wondered what was inside, and that Sunday afternoon, wanting to call ahead to a friend, I pulled over.
“That’s the owner,” he shrugged indifferently, pointing toward the only other occupant of the room, a squat, dark-haired woman with her nose in the television.
Jane Hamilton, one of my favorite contemporary writers, coming into national acclaim for her new novel, A Map of the World, has the brilliant ability to do the same thing. She takes the rural midwest out of its Norman Rockwell frame and paints the picture grimmer, gives it dark textures and depth, all the while making it clear that she doesn’t love the countryside or its people less.
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In 1988’s The Book of Ruth, which won the prestigious PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for first novel, Hamilton ushers the reader into the run-down, luckless lives of a rural Illinois family living within spitting distance of the Wisconsin border. The story quietly unfolds into a shocking tale of domestic violence, the germ of it inspired by an actual incident. Hamilton sets it in fictional Honey Creek, a speck of a town, the type of place urban passersby label “charming” as they blithely speed by. But Hamilton never lets the reader view it as one-dimensional. Even before she takes us inside the decrepit farmhouse where the three main characters live in psychological, if not physical, squalor, she shows us the town–through narrator Ruth’s eyes–as a bare-bones refuge for people too timid or old to venture into the wider world. The river for which the town is named is black with mud and farmers’ chemicals. There’s a store that “doesn’t have anything useful except beer and milk, toothpaste and potato chips”; a post office alongside which a tethered dog moans at church bells all day; and a cinder block factory that doesn’t provide enough jobs to support even the half of the inhabitants still young enough to work.
“Every time I thought about living in New York when I was in college, I got a stomach ache,” Hamilton told People magazine in a May interview, suggesting that she had been ripe all along for a transplant to quiet Wisconsin.
Their rural paradise thus souring like bad milk, the Goodwins’ lives themselves begin to curdle. The family’s fall from grace begins when a friend’s child under Alice’s care drowns in the farm pond. Stressed by the demands of dealing with her own two small girls, Alice had paused a moment too long to look over something she’d come across in a drawer that morning: a crayon map of the world she’d drawn as a lonely child. While she is upstairs ruminating over the perfect world she created, two-year-old Lizzie runs out the kitchen door and down the lane to the pond.
There is a mind-set in small towns through which many people convince themselves they are safe from crime and drugs, from disintegration of the family and other values they hold dear, simply by virtue of living far away from big cities and the heterogeneous demographics and ideas there. It’s not a mind-set, by the way, that is limited to Wisconsin; it could also account for the way Winnetka police went after “international terrorists” in a shocking murder case some years back, diverting their attention from a local youth who was the real perpetrator.
