Earlier this year an email from a literary agent arrived in my inbox. The agent wanted to introduce me to one of her clients, a debut novelist from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the agent recalled that I was also from the same region. Perhaps I’d also like to read a review copy of the book? I was flattered and curious. It turns out the author lives a short half hour from my family’s cabin in the eastern U.P. It was a place I knew well. I hit reply, telling the agent to send me a copy of the book and that I’d love an introduction.
It’s my good fortune to divvy up my varied writing career as a book critic and I mostly receive excellent books. A Good Animal, Sara Maurer’s debut, is exactly that: excellent. It was published last month to great acclaim, and while I could go on and on about the coming-of-age story set on a sheep farm outside of Sault St. Marie, Michigan, there was one element that deeply resonated with me. I see it happening here in the Flathead Valley, too.
At its heart, A Good Animal, is about how kids in rural places are typically offered two stark options once they reach the age of maturity: stay or go. Everett, the novel’s main character, is the son of a sheep farmer and he has no plans to leave the farm. He doesn’t care that his classmates are encouraged to flee for colleges or big cities below the Mackinac Bridge. His greatest loves are the sheep and the landscape of undulating hay fields before the soil meets the Great Lakes. Everett falls in love with Mary and she knows that to make it as an artist, she must leave. She has no intention to stay, and Everett thinks he can change her mind.
I recently interviewed Sara for a Michigan magazine, and I told her that this primary tension in the novel struck me like a gut punch. While I didn’t grow up on a sheep farm in the U.P., I did grow up in a small, rural town near the Mackinac Bridge that separates the two peninsulas, and it was a cultural message that if you wanted to make something of yourself, you had to leave town. Sara explained that she too felt this when she was young and that same feeling returned decades later when she moved back to Sault St. Marie with her family. Even though she had accomplished a lot in her career and had a master’s degree, she couldn’t quite shake feeling like a loser for moving back home. It was this tension that she wanted to explore when she started to write the novel. She didn’t think those who stayed in her small town to raise livestock or work at the bank or plow the roads were losers but what worried her was the message that rural kids continue to face. She had once felt it, and now returning to her hometown, she wished to explore it more deeply.
This happens here, too. There’s an undercurrent that makes kids, particularly those who grow up in small towns, feel like they can’t be successful if they stay. With the housing affordability crisis in the Flathead Valley, this only exacerbates the message. I teach college writing at Flathead Valley Community College and most, if not all, of my students cite how unaffordable it is for them to stay here. Real estate prices well outpace local salary earnings. I can’t disagree with housing affordability, but I want to challenge this notion that rural kids have but two choices. As Sara and I chatted, we both asked what does it say about our local community members if we pin them as either successful for leaving town or mediocre if they remain in place? What does it say about rural towns that needed talented doctors and lawyers and teachers and farmers? How do we combat this damaging and false narrative?
I was that kid who felt an inordinate amount of pressure to leave Boyne City (which, in the great cosmic comedy of life, has gone from being an economically depressed town into a booming boutique town, Main Street is now filled with shops, and my hometown that I couldn’t wait to flee is now one of Michigan’s most desired locales) and so I did. So, I left, but I didn’t feel like I could make it in a big city so I found another small, rural area. Twenty odd years later, I’m still here and I’m still trying to work through this perpetual rural question that serves no one. Like most of my lessons learned in life, this is yet another one I found in the pages of a book.