This little book is simply excellent, and an example of why I'll always make time for classics; it's of its time in the sense that people don't really write things like this in present-day, but it's wholly timeless in its quality and its humanity and relatability.

It's a little bit of an interesting format, too. You can call it a novel, I suppose, but it's really a collection of short stories or vignettes taking place in the titular town, some more loosely or tightly connected than others. There are characters that show up throughout the book and then there are characters that get their own chapter and are never heard from again. Most of the stories feature a young newspaper employee George Willard in some form or another, with things tending to happen around him rather than to him.

These are slice of life stories that vary slightly in tone and weight, but as the book goes along the narratives and themes take shape and the significance of things are continually magnified or revealed. Some of the through-line themes of the book are various characters' desire to overcome circumstances or become something more, and to make connections with other people and communicate desires, hopes and intentions yet being met with doubt, fear, and ultimately failure at the moment of opportunity. Big plans and rousing hearts and then a fizzle out and retreat.

The book reminds me in ways of some writing by other authors I enjoy like Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck. Not quite that good, I'd say, but also not far off. And there's that same insight into the human condition, that blunt matter of fact pain with a wink of tenderness, and certain sage way of saying big, profound things with short, mundane sentences.

It's good.