The best novels for an honest look at rural America

Even picturesque Maine has its rough side, and Empire Falls paints a complex and intriguing portrait of a rural town down on its luck and the tenuous ties between two of its most constant families, current and past.

It is a unique work where I fell in love with the story, without necessarily falling in love with the characters, as they were far too nuanced for such a simplistic emotion. Despite its nearly 500 pages, I ripped through it in just a few days, though my mind long lingered on what the future could offer this rusty mill town and its residents.

As a child I watched my parents’ marriage collapse, my mother exhausted by an often solo task of raising children and managing an active farm, while my father charged into his work as a part-time farmer and full-time oil well driller.

Years later, when I read The Bridges of Madison County it felt like part of my mom had been transported into its pages, as the neglected Francesca. It helped me better understand her, as well as the often rumor-ridden atmosphere of rural communities.

It also aided me in coming to terms with the fracturing of my own family, as I found comfort in how Waller’s story provided a more forgiving and soothing conclusion, one that doesn’t demonize either Francesca or her rural way of life.

I’ve read this book twice. I read it first as a teenager anxious to escape my rural upbringing, seeing more of the ugly in the written words, the dying town, and the bitterness and hopelessness exhibited by some of the characters.
But reading it as an adult some years removed from my country roots, I saw it in a different light. Then it pulled me into the kindness and sense of community that is almost unique to rural areas, such as the way Sam keeps a kind eye on the young folks of the town, especially those he fears may go wayward.

McMurtry was a master of creating a sense of place and character without overlabored descriptions, as I felt I knew and could relate to all the players, and that I had personally walked the dusty streets of Anarene.

Many would point to Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café as her opus to rural America, but the broader scope of The Whole Town’s Talking pulled me in instantly.

She draws out a full history of a small town, its good and bad and the people that made their mark there, some from birth to death. Even after death, their voices remain an active part of her tale, remaining as unbashful observers from the cemetery on the hill.

So much of rural America has fallen into disrepair, as does Flagg’s fictional Elmwood Springs, but I hold out hope that the increase in telecommuting and simmering desires to leave urban (and suburban) lives behind can reinvigorate some of these sleeping villages that are spread across much of the nation. 

Having grown up in the rural Ozark Mountains, I saw firsthand both the best of its people and the worst of the fragile edges of its society.

Winter’s Bone is a book that unapologetically tells a story of how these two aspects are not exclusive of each other. From the protective and driven daughter of a poor hill family to the destructive and brutal reality that the intrusion of drugs has brought to rural America, Woodrell’s complex work explores loyalty and contradiction while emphasizing the gray area that often exists in community morals.

It’s a book that will pull you in – giving you drama, crime and an appreciation for how perseverance for a cause or duty can endure in even the most hostile situation.