The Soul of a Small Town

By John Skow

From a ridge on Mount Holyoke--the mountain, not the college--Tracy Kidder looks down at Northampton, Mass., near where he lives. He has just written an impressionistic portrait of this old New England community, Home Town (Random House; 349 pages; $25.95). From his perch, he dreams up a lofty introduction that concludes, "...the cornfields are a dream of perfect order, and the town seems entirely coherent, self-contained, a place where a person might live a whole life and consider it complete, a tiny civilization all its own." Then, beguiled by a sentimental image, he adds, "The town below fits in the palm of your hand. Shake it and it snows."

Not really. That sugary last sentence, conjuring a toy town in a glass paperweight, doesn't describe Northampton or, fortunately, Kidder's fond but unsentimental book. The author's great gift, in fact, is for looking at his subjects straight on. He did this impressively in The Soul of a New Machine (1981), about the development of a supermini-computer, and in House (1985), about the jostling interchanges among architect, builders and buyers of a private home.

Kidder surveys Northampton through several sets of eyes--those of a local judge, a shelf of historians, a gabble of politicians, a small-bore drug dealer and an adult scholarship student at Smith College. But the observer who tells most of the story--whose life, to a considerable extent, is the story--is a not quite middle-aged town cop named Tommy O'Connor. If what he had to tell were simply the reports of night patrols, arrests made, cars chased, shots taken or withheld, the view would be a narrow kind of truth. But O'Connor was born in town--his father Bill was the county treasurer--played Little League here, has seen jobs dry up and the downtown decay, and then, with the mixed feelings that natives reserve for too prosperous newcomers, has seen the fine old town center yuppified, gussified, boutiqued into economic health. He has watched the decline of his own Irish as a force in the town, and the rise of activist lesbians and utterly apolitical, though mildly troublesome, kids with green hair and nose rings. He's a tough, no-fooling cop, but he's able to say, and mostly believe, "All the lunacy, that's half the beauty of it. This is a great town to work in." The half-mocking nickname he has earned from fellow cops is "Father O'Connor," and he will joke and scold and reason with a cranky teenager, and listen for a long time to a young mother whose record of staying off drugs is not quite spotless.

The author of this extraordinary job of reporting and writing sees the town's humanity through this very human cop, but well before a reader might say, "Yes, yes, got it," he veers off to tell other stories. What he finds amazes him. You'd be overcome, he muses, if all the town's roofs came off and you were forced to look down--"and not just by malignancy and suffering, but by all the tenderness and joy, all the little acts of courage and kindness...to apprehend it all at once--who could stand it?"

--By John Skow