Magic Hours by Tom Bissell

intentions, your statements or actions... may send the wrong message, and you’ll find yourself disliked.” Even for a booster like Clayton, the small town is ineffably the Other. Some of Clayton’s pointers (“If you truly have a secret that absolutely nobody should know, then tell absolutely nobody”)
read like transcriptions from a counterintelligence manual; others (“Your brash New York sales technique may offend reticent dairy farmers”) come off as deconstructions of New Yorker cartoons. But in the face of lifestyle decompression, Clayton is optimism’s archangel. Small-town folk may at first be unsophisticated and a little frightening, he assures, but by obeying draconian rural protocol and (the implication is clear) not expecting very much, you will soon become a welcome member of the community.
    Clayton’s evidence-gathering in the case of Small Town v. City will be greeted by many without skepticism. Most Americans, after all, do not live in small towns but in suburbs or micropolitan “edge cities,” such as those outside of Phoenix, Houston, and Atlanta. Whether hated, loved, mourned, or celebrated, the small town is, to those who do not live in them, an alternate universe whose values fall hideously short or gloriously surpass those of their referents. Many of our stumping politicians speak plangently of their small-town origins, while most mass entertainments prefer a more cynical vision of small-town life. However small towns are portrayed, they are never Now, and they are never You.
    For browbeaten city-dwellers whose rural flight needs more codified guidance than the bromides of Small Town Bound, there is Norman Crampton’s The 100 Best Small Towns in America. Crampton ranks small towns according to their “uniqueness” and “quality.” His complicated formula involves average income, percentage of nonwhites, crime rate, and local government spending on education, among other brow-wrinkling concerns. Communities like Beaufort, South Carolina, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, with their singular mission of providing summer housing for millionaires and sucking money out of tourists, score highly in Crampton’s playoff. (Escanaba, needless to say, does not merit a mention.)
    When discussing the thousands of anti-Provincetowns lacking the restorative power of boutique art and agreeable
socioeconomics, small-town boosterism goes only so far. “The good small towns are booming,” John Clayton writes. “The bad ones are dying.” Probably, Clayton would toe-tag my hometown in an instant. Escanaba offers its citizens almost nothing appreciable beyond a stagnant local economy and community theater. Despite this, a good chunk of each graduating class hangs around. Every year enough old high-school acquaintances migrate back from Milwaukee or Detroit to give vague misgivings to those of us with no such designs. In a small town, success is the simplest arithmetic there is. To achieve it, you leave—then subsequently bore your new big-city friends with accounts of your narrow escape. Indeed, when I was younger, I felt certain that what kept small-town people in their small towns was some tragic deficiency.
    My stridency was fortified by American literature’s constellation of small-town exiles. Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson all wrote their best work after abandoning their small Midwestern hometowns. Only Cather opted for aria. Hemingway, typically, chose silence, not once writing about Oak Park, Illinois. Fitzgerald seemed to hold his Minnesota boyhood in a regard that is half sneering, half heartbroken. In Main Street and Babbit, Lewis horsewhipped America’s small towns so ferociously the latter has become synonymous with everything strangling and conformist about them. Anderson is the most influential small-town anatomist, his Winesburg, Ohio famously coining the