Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 6/10
Thought Provoker: 6/10
Overall: 3 stars

I have been so very delinquent. I probably finished reading The Town about 3 months ago. Once a week I think, ‘I REALLY should write the review’ and compose a summary in my head of what I want to say. And yet, clearly, procrastination has prevailed. Not to mention the other two reviews I’m sitting on. But anyway…

The Town is the third in Conrad Richter’s ‘The Awakening Land’ trilogy, recounting the later stages in the life of Sayward Wheeler, the quintessential American Pioneer, and her flock of children. And it actually was quite a fascinating read just after The Magnificent Ambersons. In many ways, though it is the third in Richter’s series it is an entirely apt prequel to Tarkington’s work. If I had known, I would have read them that way ‘round.

In any case, The Town follows the ‘progress’ of a small frontiersman’s town to a more bustling American mid-western town of the 19th Century. Sayward’s generation represents the heartiness, the pluckiness, the determination and grit of the Original Pioneers. Her youngest child (and really the book’s protagonist), Chancey, is the youthful embodiment of technological progress, pacifism, and gentleness. Though this is not the gentility that starts off the Ambersons, by any means. It’s a big deal that the Wheeler’s town house has more than 2 rooms, to put things in context. Chancey is the youngest of many kids, and is born with some unspecified illness making him an invalid, until suddenly he isn’t any more because he finally realizes that maybe there isn’t anything physically wrong with him any more. There is pampering and babying, but also a smidge of negligence and certainly an inability for anyone in his family to understand him, or his point of view. So at first you feel for him. But slowly (and I choose to believe this is Richter’s point) you start to find him pitiable, and a bit cloying. Somehow Sayward, seen by her son as an old stick-in-the-mud is in fact the more dynamic, the more able to continue to adapt to change than the supposedly modern son. That’s sort-of the whole book. The relationships, which are probably Richter’s focus, to me were OK. Interesting but OK. It’s a slim read, though, so I suppose there isn’t a huge amount of time for more.

What makes the book a great deal more interesting, was just the history. The insight into what life was like for the American Pioneers entering, taming, and building the so-called wilderness for the first time. (Native Americans feature briefly in the book in a highly stereotyped way, so make no mistake this is the white man’s view.) In fact, those three words really characterize Richter’s three books – (entering) The Trees, (taming) The Fields, and (building) The Town. I did read ‘The Trees’, the first in the triliogy, and enjoyed it immensely, again just from the detailed look at day-to-day life in the woods and the existence that families managed to scrape together. Try as I might, getting my hands on The Fields proved to be nearly impossible (for any price I deemed reasonable), but from the reviews and articles I’ve found I believe my characterization is fair.

So read this book to discovery more of the history of the American white-man moving westward. You’ll glean a bit about human relationships and progress, but read it to learn what life was like in an age that is very, very hard grasp in the 21st century. And maybe we’ll learn a bit about what real work is like. Or that’s what Richter would have wanted!