On the bookshelf, #28

Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town, by Chris Bohjalian

Yes, another Chris Bohjalian book! I couldn’t wait a minute longer to read another of his books. I could gush about Bohjalian for days, but let’s face it — been there, done that. If you aren’t reading his books yet, well, there’s not much I can do about it. Except seriously doubt your good sense, obviously.

Idyll Banter is different because it isn’t a novel. It’s a collection of the essays he has written for a Vermont newspaper about life in the small village of Lincoln. With less than 1000 people and miles off the ‘main road’, Lincoln is a self-contained world where everyone knows everyone else, neighbors are always there for one another, and the town’s one grocery store is the quickest way to get a message to someone (especially since cell phones don’t work up in the mountain valley where Lincoln is located).

I found myself falling in love with the small town charm and its characters. It was easy to spot many of his novels’ plot lines and characters in the stories he wrote about real life in Vermont. There were some essays that just stood on there own. Like the story of the young girl who had a party for her elderly, ailing horse the day before the vet was due to put him down. Or the story of the flood that wiped out the entire children’s book section of the town library because those books were on the lowest shelves (which I’ve just learned is also part of his novel The Buffalo Soldier, which I just began reading).

If you are at all interested in Vermont or living in a small town, you will definitely want to read Idyll Banter. I always thought I would love living in the northeast but his description of the blizzards in the winter (where you shovel your roof even more often than your driveway), or the flooding in the spring (where cars can get stranded in the mud rivers that are dirt roads the majority of the year) or the ‘leaf peepers’ who descend on the town for three weeks each autumn may have dissuaded me from pursuing that dream.

But maybe that was his intent. After all, a small town needs strong characters to keep it alive. It doesn’t need a lot of ‘flatlanders’ invading and disrupting the fragile balance. In other words, the faint of heart need not apply.