The Places That Have Made Us

If you've been keeping a rough list of what's on my mind based on the contents of this site (and may the sweet lord help you if you have), you know that list includes: The benefits/anxieties of living in New York; the influence of family; the necessary conditions for maximizing personal creativity; and whether the AP has recently posted anything about drunken, illiterate lunatics getting mauled by zoo animals. Well, forget about that last one and you'll understand why I was so taken with a recent essay called "Medium Town" by Mark Oppenheimer. It's elegantly written, earnest in the good way, and I found myself nodding along with at least 80 percent of it.

In the piece, Oppenheimer, who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and has written two books about religion, considers several aspects of place and ambition, including the notion that many aspiring writers share, which is that living in a big coastal city is "stimulating to the creative faculties, that somehow the street life of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or the Castro in San Francisco, energizes their prose and expands their imaginative capacities." Oppenheimer isn't convinced:

It's true that an extraordinary number of the hip American novels of the last twenty years have been set, at least in part, in New York. ... And nearly every popular young fiction writer one can name lives in New York: Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Jennifer Vanderbes, Gary Shteyngart, Dara Horn, Benjamin Kunkel, Edwidge Danticat. The New York afference is so prominent at this moment in time that Meghan Daum garnered an odd amount of publicity for moving to Nebraska — she wrote an essay about it, then a novel. You might have thought she'd bought a two-bedroom co-op on the moon. ... And while time will tell, it seems that the most lasting fiction writers working today live away from New York: David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro (if I may bring in a Canadian), Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Stone, and of course Roth and Updike. None of them lives in a big city, unless you count Chabon, who lives just miles from San Francisco. Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo would seem to be exceptions, but it is interesting to note that Pynchon is from Long Island originally, and DeLillo was born in the Bronx and attended Fordham University. They are locals, not aspirants.

But even more than his take on location's importance (or lack thereof) in fueling artistic output, I was interested in Oppenheimer's thoughts on the broader psychology of being attracted to mega-cities:

I don't mean to suggest that there's anything necessarily wrong with living in New York, or that there aren't fine writers, and fine people, who live there. ... But I believe that for many people—not all—there is something neurotic about an attachment to the big city. After all, most of us do not come from the big city; we come from small towns, medium-sized towns, suburbs, exurbs, farms. Those are the places that made us. If we like who we are, like what we've become, then might there not (be) something disordered about turning our backs on our nativity? The flight from our regions and regionalisms is, in this way, not so different from the flight from our ethnicity, or our religion, or our family ties. It bespeaks an inner conflict, which is always a kind of sadness. ...

To me, living in a medium-sized town is, like going to synagogue or settling into domesticity with my wife, baby, and dog, a form of humility. It's what I want to do, but it also sends a message that I do intend: I don't have wisdom that's any better than the accumulated wisdom of generations before me. Raising children, paying a mortgage, raking leaves, knowing who my alderman is—these were the tasks that were set before my father and grandfather, and even if, by dint of more income or more education, I could be released from them, I don't think that that would make me a better person or open the door to a more satisfying life.

I say "read the whole thing" around here from time to time, and I always mean it, but this time I mean it a little more: Read the whole thing.