The Books of the States: Vermont (3 electoral votes)

Vermont didn't fall into place as easily for me as Rhode Island did. Maybe because the state has always been full of people who decamped for the woods from NYC and elsewhere--I have to confess the list I ended up with is too. I like the three I came to choose, but I would love to hear what someone rooted there thinks we should be reading about the Green Mountain State.

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: Legend apparently has it (and apparently has it wrong) that Jackson wrote "The Lottery" on returning home one day in North Bennington, VT (where her husband taught at Bennington College), after being pelted with rocks by kids in the village. I was set to pick The Lottery and Other Stories, but was swayed by Jonathan Lethem, who always strikes me as just about the best reader in the United States of America, and who claims We Have Always Lived in the Castle, another expression of--to put it mildly--discomfort with village life, is her true masterpiece. And I'm sure The Haunting of Hill House or her Erma Bombeck-with-an-edge memoir, Life Among the Savages, would have their supporters too. (By the way, the Penguin Book Club at Amazon just finished discussing We Have Always as their summer book.)
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt: My friend and colleague Brad Parsons would have my head if I didn't include this favorite, another fictional version of Bennington, this time veiled as Hampden College. That's not far from "Camden College," the thin disguise that her fellow grad Bret Easton Ellis gave it in The Rules of Attraction, and there's also a Bennington section, full of Ellisian decadence, in Lethem's Fortress of Solitude.
• Hoagland on Nature by Edward Hoagland: This is a personal pick: my favorite thing about my Harper's subscription has become the pleasure of seeing Hoagland's byline once a year or so and then getting up to my elbows in one of his long, meandering essays that take some announced subject as the occasion for endless and fruitful detours through wherever his sentences lead him, often to the yearly rhythms of his rural VT environs. I'm not sure the sense of a writer thinking is ever stronger.

These three-book states are tough. Among the others that could argue for a place here:

• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner's much-loved last novel, which centers around yearly summer-home reunions by a Vermont pond.
• Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers: Rockwell, so identified with small-town America, was born and raised in New York City, but he spent much of the peak of his career living and drawing in Arlington, VT.
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 by Hayden Carruth: Of all the urban transplants to Vermont, no one seems to have taken to his new surroundings with quite the intensity as Carruth, who died just last week. He lived in Vermont only in the middle years of a long and hard life, but much of his best-known work is grounded in that time, and he has said that he transformed himself and found his voice there.
• A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher: Mosher is the contemporary novelist who has made the most concerted project of writing about the state, particularly the "Northern Kingdom" along the Canadian border.
• My Garden by Jamaica Kincaid: the fabulous Kincaid has lived in Vermont for many years, but she, with this very local exception, has mainly written about her home island of Antigua and New York City.
• Midwives by Chris Bohjalian: the bestselling novelists' weekly columns for his local VT paper are collected in Idyll Banter.
• A Cool Million by Nathanael West: I'm about as big a N. West fan as they come, so I must note his over-the-top Horatio Alger satire, whose hero, Lemuel Pitkin, hails from humble circumstances in Ottsville, VT.
• Vermont has become a bit of a comics hotbed: Alison Bechdel lives there now (she drew the Vermont essay for State by State), and the Center for Cartoon Studies, one of the first institutions of the new wave of indie comics, opened its doors in White River Junction a few years ago. But the best-known VT native in comics? Frank Miller, of all people. It's hard to make a case that Sin City or The Dark Knight Returns qualify as Vermont books.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Comments

[antonio gonzalez on October 07, 2008 at 09:24 PM]

I suppose choosing favorites, any favorites, is as hard as picking your dearest child. But it wounds me deeply that the grand Vermont naturalist, Bernd Heinrich, author of MIND OF THE RAVEN, and WINTER WORLD and so many scientific original contributions is ignored. The impact of his books is "staggering", specially if you like to read about the "secret" lives of flying squirrels and the magic of "diminutive kinglets," the truly incredible tale of the hivernation of black bears and chipmunks, and he also introduces living frozen species that defrost back to life as insects and frogs. All his books are written in crystaline prose no less powerful than his illustrators contributions. And, no he visits Maine for research purposes,but no, again no, he is from Vermont. His books are scientific, accurate and yet, glorious. When you find one, pick it up!

[Tom on October 07, 2008 at 09:35 PM]

Thanks, Antonio--great suggestion.

[S McAllen on November 22, 2008 at 06:29 PM]

I have to send out a strong recommendation for John C. Gardner's 'October Light'. Never having traveled to Vermont, this strange and beautiful novel has elevated the state to a place I must visit in the autumn. The characters and sense of the environment is really quite unique.