Word: hamilton
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Davis asked a census specialist for a town "northern enough to be industrial, southern enough to have a gently rural aspect, western enough to have once been on the frontier, eastern enough to have a past." He came-up with Hamilton, "a city, a self-contained town, a suburb, a satellite in the orbits of both Cincinnati and Dayton, a minor metropolitan cluster, a country seat, a bump on the plain, a galactic microdot where 63.189 people want to see what will happen next. "Davis probably could not have done better in his search for an American stew...
DAVIS'S RELIANCE on anecdotes is all the more frustrating because he seems to have something to say about Hamilton--and America--but it too frequently gets buried by the narrative. As a bona fide resident of Hamilton, Davis can avoid the cliches so common to "mood of the country" pieces, the kind made most famous by Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post and regurgitated with such predictability come the New Hampshire primary. ("The waitress poured another cup of coffee at the Portsmouth Diner and talk, as it tends to at this time of year, turned to politics...") Davis...
...agonizing story of Sam Shie, a man persecuted viciously for a "crime" that probably never even happened, splits Hamilton down the middle, and seems (yet again) a metaphor for the divisions that have made Hamilton an unhappy place for so long. The people of Hamilton, says Davis, all live within little cocoons within the larger cocoon of Hamilton itself, unwilling to understand the feelings and aspirations of their neighbors. With no help from a newspaper that "exemplified the lack of communication among the sum of Hamilton's parts," the people wander in a stratified world that defies the much-loved...
Davis also never succumbs to good-old-daysism, noting how the discontinuities of the present have long existed in equally virulent strains. Unlike the town leaders, Davis realizes that the chief objective of Hamilton's youth has always been to leave the city. "America," Davis writes in a pithy epigram, "was not where you started but where you started over." Hamilton was and remains a place to start, not start over. But social mobility never lived up to its reputation, and so Davis implies, neither did America...
...book--little dramas meant to illuminate the whole. The tactic does not lack merit entirely; only a crank would demand a portrait based exclusively on generalizations and "facts and figures." But Hometown rests exclusively on the evocative anecdote, the symbol instead of the substance. His hints at Hamilton's significance for all of our hometowns never amount to much more than just that, and so Peter Davis gives us Hamilton but not Hometown...