About book Welcome To Utopia: Notes From A Small Town (2010)
Karen Valby is a colleague of mine at Entertainment Weekly, and I've always loved her writing from long before I knew her. This book caught me off guard because, knowing how gentle and kind Karen is, I expected a warm, Garrison Keillor-like approach to her chronicle of life of this tiny, rural Texas town, which attracted her attention because it was so cut off from the pop-culture-saturated hustle of mainstream America. It is full of characters who are hard to love, but -- to be fair -- are equally hard to dislike. These are men and women who would sacrifice almost anything for a neighbor, but view the outside world with contempt and fear. They send their sons and daughters to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan, but harbor scorn for the larger fabric of America, which they see as corrupt, dishonest, and unpatriotic. Even the good ol' guys who hang around the General Store seem like lovable lunks, until they start dropping the casual racist slurs. When they realize Valby is adopting a black daughter, and has been reduced to tears, they are all apologies -- but it's what we do when we think we're with our "own kind" that shows who we truly are. And that's the question of this book: Who are we? Not just for the people of Utopia, Texas, but for the people reading these stories.Welcome to Utopia is the story of modern tribalism. People who aren't bad, but are so close-minded they don't even know when they are making bad decisions. There is a lot of love and generosity in this book, a sign of what's truly at the heart of many of these individuals. But Welcome to Utopia shows how easy it is to be small while living in a small world.The book goes out of its way not to judge, and another reader might come away with an entirely different perspective. I think what Valby has done is paint a loving portrait of her subjects, and by refusing to gloss over their flaws, she has painted a true one, too. She embraces the mistakes that every one of us has, and tries to see the whole -- honestly, without delusion. If everyone did the same, we'd live in a much bigger, much happier place. Very interesting and purposely dated book. A writer from Entertainment Weekly wrote a story about the least pop cultured town in America and turned it into a whole book. I remember this article from years ago and the book was just as good, if not better because you dove more into the peoples lives and got to know them more. I love books on small towns. How the olds don't want change and the young all move away and how that's changed America over the last 200 years, especially over the last 50. It's crazy how much has changed in such a short time. This book wasn't too anti-pop culture, more about certain people, of all ages and races. Just an interesting take on it and how the writer interacted with them, but it wasn't too much which was good. Just the right amount of that for my liking. Not technical, just a small character study.
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It wasn't terrible, but there didn't seem to be a point to this book.
—Fickenaze
