4:07
Even before “Mayberry,” before “Happy Days,” before Disney, the small town had been held in the American imagination as a kind of Eden, with no urban filth or crime; the houses have big porches, the happy freckled children play on rope swings.
It was heaven.
Anderson, in 1919, pulled back the curtain on this fraud. Life is claustrophobic, narrow, everyone knows your business and nonconformity is barely tolerated. Young people feel a powerful urge to get out, to live freer lives elsewhere.
A small town proceeds peacefully enough in times of prosperity, allowing a certain live-and-let-live attitude.
But in McKean’s 12 stories, set between 1971 and 2015, in Ganaego, Pennsylvania, the citizens’ lives become more and more stressful. The huge mill along the river, which had employed nearly everyone, either directly or indirectly, shrinks in size, falters, closes.