Hometown
Connolly, Paul
HOMETOWN: A CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CHRONICLE, by Peter Davis, Simon & Schuster, $14.95, (331 pp.) Stirring facts into a fiction to give it body is an honorable trick of storytelling. Blending...
...Hometown, which the Library of Congress catalogs as history, is actually docudrama, a genre which, in Davis's hands, aspires "to combine categories of social research with techniques of storytelling" by melding the art of Sherwood Anderson with the social science of Robert and Helen Lynd...
...Blending fiction into facts to lend them drama is, however, lying, plain and simple...
...Hamilton-America-is depicted in scenes that are unrelievedly tawdry, vulgar...
...Here a commonplace wedding, a prototypical ballgame...
...But Hometown is a version of America, not a vision, and is as much an editorial as raw, untutored news...
...there, an ordinary street shooting, a familiar strike...
...The result is bastardy...
...Maybe this is a truth about our society...
...Seen up close and impersonal, Hamilton/ America is a drab, infernal place, "united against outsiders, divided against itself...
...If Peter Davis's book were but a story, it would be dramatic reading...
...Hamilton, Ohio, we are asked to believe here, can stand for all America, if viewed closely, carefully...
...But Davis is an award-winning newsman and filmmaker ("Hearts and Minds," "The Selling of the Pentagon," and last spring, on PBS TV, "Middletown," the video version of this book...
...The documentary camera magnifies our every follicle until, like Gulliver in the land of the Brobdingnagians, we are revolted by every wart and mole...
...PAUL CONNOLLY...
...But it is not the whole truth nor is it nothing but the truth...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 18
