Our Town revisited

Tom Lake, Grovers' Corners, & what was really going on there

Before we begin…

Last call for your most notable three books of 2023. What are the books that you are glad you read? Are there books that will stay with you even if you didn’t love them? Tell us in the comments and they will be included in the Spark Reads 2023 list in next week’s newsletter. See the books from last year at Spark Reads 2022. 

Welcome! You’ve reached Spark.  Learn more here or just read on. If you received this from a friend, please join us by subscribing. It’s free! All you have to do is press the button below. If you have already subscribed, welcome back! If you see something you like, please hit that heart so others can find us more easily. And if this email is truncated in your inbox, just click the headline above to come on through and read everything all at once.

“It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true. Our Town taught me that. I had memorized the lessons before I understood what they meant. No matter how many years ago I’d stopped playing Emily, she is still here. All of Grover’s Corners is in me.” -  Ann Patchett, Tom Lake  

Peterborough, NH, the inspiration for Grover’s Corners from the digital collections at the New York Public Library.

Pedaling From Tom Lake to Grover’s Corners

In the past few months, a few of us have talked about Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake in the comments here at Spark and it’s come up a lot in my offline talks with friends about the books we are reading. People seem to love it or struggle with it, sometimes both. For a long time after finishing it, I was not sure how I felt. Then, for the first time since I was a teenager, I watched a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and my heart broke. 

There I was, pumping away on the recumbent bike in our bedroom, curious about the play that serves as a touchstone for the novel. Then Paul Newman, as the Stage Manager, walks out onto a minimal set and I’m no longer in my bedroom or in San Diego. I’m drawn into the account of life in a small New Hampshire town called Grover’s Corners in the year 1901. It feels like home. It feels like a glimpse of history, an artifact of a way of life that has disappeared. It also feels like looking into a mirror that shows how little has really changed when it comes to how humans live their lives and what is, or ought to be, important.  

For a few moments in the opening act, I held back. There was something too precious, too Hallmark-card about the idea of the quintessential New England town with its farms, flower gardens, gathering spots, and its actors who spoke with various degrees of success in the local accents. I prickled a bit at the delineations that are accepted as natural in Grover’s Corners and the insularity that keeps the rest of the world at a distance. There Is the small “professional” class who live in town and the farmers who deliver the milk by horse. Train tracks divide the much larger white protestant section from the small-but-growing “Polish town” where immigrants, “a few Canucks,” live alongside the town’s Catholic church. We are shown the big white house on the hill where the owner of the town’s textile mill lives. Everyone of the town’s 2,642 citizens knows each other, or about each other, or are related. 

They also know how to maintain a necessary distance, to live and let live. Everyone knows, for example, about the church choir leader’s drinking problem and melancholy but they don’t intervene or intrude. People, we are told, do what they can to help those who need it and “leave the others alone.” The world of Grover’s Corners is contained; most of the children born there stay there and raise their families, even if they’ve gone away to school. The town is “86 percent Republican, 6% Democrat, four percent Socialist, the rest: indifferent.” It is an ordinary place with ordinary people who are a little bit “dull” and choose the beauty nature provides over the art and music that make up “culture.” 

But very quickly it became clear that the play is not about the town itself; it’s about all of life which just happens to unfold there as it does everywhere else. Wherever people live they are born, they seek companionship, they work, they give birth, they die. If they are lucky they grow old before they die. If they are particularly lucky, they grasp a little of what it means to be alive and to be human before they go. 

In the third Act, Emily, the girl who falls in love and marries in Acts 1 and 2, dies giving birth. As she takes her place in the town cemetery with the others she understands for the first time how little she noticed while she was alive. She wants to relive one day of her life even though the others and the Stage Manager who is, after all, God, warn her it won’t go the way she hopes. And it doesn’t. It can’t. Her husband, her mother, her brother, her father all just go on the way they always have because they don’t see the losses that await them. She wants them to look, really look. They don’t. At this point in the play, I forgot that the actor playing Emily in the version I was watching was not my cup of tea. I felt the urgency and pain she felt when she realized she had never understood how important the smallest things could be. 

“Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama...just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!...It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize....Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some. ― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

By the end of the play, I had stopped pedaling the stationary bike. I had tears in my eyes. Outside the sun was setting, lighting up the window with streaks of scarlet but leaving my room in shadow. The dogs wandered over and sat down to let me know it was time for their dinner. I could hear the sounds of my husband moving around the kitchen, seeing what he could put together for an evening meal. There was nothing unusual about the moment; it repeats several nights a week. This time, though, I looked as hard as I could, at all of it. Before it slipped away. 

“The sky is beginning to show some streaks of light over in the East there, behind our mount’in. The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go,—doesn’t it?” Thornton Wilder, Our Town 

Back to Tom Lake

When it comes to Ann Patchett I am nearly a completist. I have read all her novels and her two books of essays but I have yet to read the books she’s written for children. Some – Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto – remain among my favorite novels of all time. Her voice on the page is always compelling because of her humor, eye for detail, and above all her confidence. All of these things are present in Tom Lake. A family is forced back together on the family farm by the pandemic. As they work to care for and harvest the year’s crop of cherries, the three daughters insist that their mother tell them the story of her love affair with a famous actor she met while she was a young actor playing Emily in Our Town in a summer theater at Tom Lake. 

In many ways the story unfolds as the story of Emily and George unfolds in Our Town: looping back and forth from the past to the present, pausing here and there to spotlight people whose roles are smaller but key. There is a strong sense of place – the farm, Tom Lake, and the protagonist’s home town in New Hampshire where she plays Emily for the first time. There is love, death, desire and yearning – the mother’s as a young woman and the daughters’ now as they are forced to put their lives on hold. Like Emily, Lara, the mother, is now able to see clearly, to notice and to savor life – even this period of danger because of the virus – in ways her daughters can’t yet. As with the play, Our Town, there are many beautiful observations and moments. There is a sense of familiar insularity that Grover’s Corners derives from its location and culture but the family farm in Tom Lake derives from the isolation caused by the pandemic. For me, though, the greatest gift that came from reading this novel was making me seek out and drink in once again the play which comforts and troubles me still in a way that this novel, as good as it is, does not. 

If you’ve read Tom Lake, or seen/read Our Town, how did they strike you? What was comforting? What was troubling?

---

Our Town, interpretations and links

Viewed through the lens of the current moment, the whiteness of Grover’s Corners stands out; it is, after all, in New Hampshire, one of the whitest states in the nation even today. The universality of its themes, however, were highlighted in a 2021 multi-racial production of Our Town in Peterborough, NH widely accepted as the inspiration for Grover’s Corners. The cast included Aliah Whitmore, the granddaughter of James Whitmore, Sr. who was scheduled to play part of the stage manager at one point. In this piece from the Washington Post, she says, “It was a play I lamented I would never be asked to participate in,” Whitmore said. “You can see clearly when it’s performed that its concepts are beneath, above and within all human beings.” 

On film

If you’re looking for something to add to your holiday movie list, try Our Town. There are no Christmas trees or carols, no elves or Scrooges. Just a few people talking about things that matter.

Here are three ways to watch Our Town on the screen, all free. The best is the Paul Newman version even though the portrayals of Emily and George strike a slightly off-key note. The Lincoln Center stage production with Spalding Gray as the stage manager is filled with moving moments. Emily is spot on. Gray himself, though, left me disappointed. If you want Hollywood’s glam version, try the 1940 movie starring William Holden. 

On the page

Sometimes, a person just wants to absorb the lines in her own way.  I ordered a copy of the play to have for those moments when I want to revisit the lines that moved me and see how their meanings strike me over time. You can find a copy here in the Spark Community Book Recommendations page at bookshop.org. 

---

Welcome New Subscribers!

If you’ve just subscribed, thank you so much for being here. If you would like to check out past issues, here’s a quick link to the archives. Be sure to check out our Resources for Readers and Writers too where you will find links for readers, book clubs, writers, and writing groups. And if you’d like to browse for your next read, don’t forget to check out books by authors in our community at the Spark Author Page which will be updated with new names and books for next week’s issue. Another great source: the many wonderful reviews you’ll find among the #Bookstackers. 

The more the merrier! Please share with your friends and invite them to join us!

That’s it for this week. Let me know how you are and what you’re reading. If there’s an idea, book, or question you’d like to see in an upcoming issue of Spark, let us know! Use the comment button below or just hit reply to this email and send your message directly. 

And remember, If you like what you see or it resonates with you, please take a minute to click the heart ❤️ below - it helps more folks to find us!

Ciao for now! 

Gratefully yours,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…a glimpse of life from somewhere outside “my town” in the 1920s

Filled with nostalgia, I went looking for a photo or two of the town I grew up in. I didn’t find what I was looking for but I did find this shot from a winter back in the 1920s, on the Jefferson, NH Historical Society Facebook page. I keep wondering if the horse is pondering how fast life goes…

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”: 

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

I can’t wait to see what you send!

And remember, if you like what you see or it resonates with you, please share Spark with a friend and take a minute to click the heart ❤️ below - it helps more folks to find us!