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What makes a place home? As he researched his book Home Town, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder (Soul of a New Machine, 1981) wasn't sure he knew the answer. That's why he writes.

"I can look into parts of the world I don't understand and don't know about, and that's pretty wonderful," said Kidder in a recent telephone interview. The only thing he felt sure of was he wanted to study Northampton, Massachusetts. "It still preserves the old pattern of the New England township," he writes, "a place with a full set of parts."

Like Plato's ideal city-state, Northampton is home to 30,000 people. It also stands out in bold relief from Haiti, where Kidder had gone as a reporter during the military takeover after Aristede. In Haiti, absolutely nothing worked. After his return, Kidder thought he might research all the components that make a place function, and more, make a place feel like home. "I'm sickened by strip malls, gated communities, decaying, dying old downtowns. We've lost that sense of ancestry in a place, longevity," he said. "I grew up in Long Island, a place that vanished in front of my eyes. I grew up there in the '50s, in the great building boom. It was pretty distressing—you go away and come home and find a whole town gone, a cloverleaf in its place."

While he pondered how to approach his subject, someone approached him at the gym. "This guy on the machine next to me, baldheaded guy, completely shaved head, said, 'You don't remember me, do you? I arrested you five years ago for speeding.' Then he said, 'Why don't you come and ride around in the cruiser with me? You'll see a Northampton you've never seen.'"

This was Tommy O'Connor, a cop born and bred in Northampton. Two years of riding around with Tommy gave Kidder something different from the vantage points you usually see. "Northampton has layers and layers. I saw a whole side of it I didn't know, hadn't imagined had existed." It also gave him a way to tell his story. Though richly peppered with archival research about Northampton, the heart of Home Town is its people. "The world doesn't make much sense to me generally," said Kidder. "I don't feel like I'm good at that. I like particular people, particular places."

Northampton feels like home because the author has created a montage of the lives of its citizens much the way Sherwood Anderson did in his 1919 short story collection, Winesburg, Ohio. "I read it a couple of times again—not that I had the same kind of story or constructed it in the same way, but I love the thing." Unlike Anderson's characters, those in Kidder's book are real, even though some, like eccentric Alan Scheinman, resplendent with obsessive-compulsive disorder, make it hard to remember Home Town is nonfiction.

"Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange," admitted the author, but Alan is as much a part of the town as Laura, a single mother from California who's come to study at Smith College and Frankie, the town's well-meaning vagrant. They all call Northampton home, but the book's center and its moral compass is Tommy O'Connor.

Fate—or Kidder's lead foot on the gas pedal—may have brought Tommy to him, but Tommy continued to compel Kidder. Having lived all his life in Northampton, he knew every person in town. It gave him a sense of connection and responsibility palpable even beneath his brash exterior.

"There's a moment in the book where he is reinventing Kant," Kidder recalled. "It's a little more elegant than Kant, actually. He says, what's right is right, what's wrong is wrong, and the state of your internal being doesn't matter. You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness."

Home Town chronicles what happens when reality corrodes Tommy's ideals. "Memory is so much a part of imagination, so plastic, so wonderfully plastic," said Kidder. "If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you. It was certainly true in the case of Tommy O'Connor. No childhood was as happy as the one he had assembled for himself, no town so wonderful, and that's sort of something he had to get over. If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen."

That something didn't happen to Tommy, it happened to his best friend, whom Kidder refers to in the book as Rick Janacek. Rick was Tommy's childhood friend, his friend on the force and in many ways, Tommy's mirror. Then Rick announced to Tommy he was an alcoholic, he was getting divorced and his wife had issued a restraining order against him, accusing Rick of sexually abusing one of their daughters. This sort of thing shouldn't happen in Northampton, not the Northampton Tommy knew and policed. Charmed by the place himself, Kidder explained, "It's one of the few civilized parts of America. I like the way it looks, the sense that history surrounds you in a constructed landscape. It's picturesque, authentic. It's where people grew up or wish they had grown up." The potential for evil in Tommy's home town felt to him like a betrayal, a rending in the fabric of his life. For the first time, he questioned the place he loved and his role in it.

Tommy's story—and Rick's, Alan's, Laura's, and Frankie's—are engaging as stories and amazing in their candor. What made these people tell Kidder the sad truths of their lives? The author cited a remark attributed to both Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers: "'Nothing human is alien to me'—that's the state of mind I'd like to aspire to. You don't get far with people by judging them, and one of the nice things of my profession is I don't have to. It makes things a lot more fun, more interesting. It's important to hang around with people for a while, let people know what they're getting into. I try to make people have their eyes as open as they can be."

And like Tommy O'Connor, he feels both affection for and responsibility to the people he connects to with his writing. "I think," said Kidder, "there's a certain level of decency and honor."

In Home Town, as with other works like Old Friends and Among Schoolchildren, Kidder learned a big lesson from a small place. "One of the things I wanted you to feel in this book, when you were with each of the characters, you'd really be with the person, engaged, wondering what would happen and why. Then I wanted to move you away and have you feel, oh, yes, this is important, there's something larger, a bigger vessel. Home is," said Kidder, "the strange combination of history and present life and culture that make a place good for human life."

The home town he portrays in his book embraces more than pretty streets and solid infrastructure. It evokes sanctuary, nostalgia, longing, belonging, and loss.

Ellen Kanner has interviewed many authors for BookPage.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, Broke Heart Blues, headlines scream SUBURBAN TEEN TRIED IN SHOOTING DEATH OF MOTHER’S LOVER. That teen, John Reddy Heart, is the book’s mysterious, romantic central figure and the source of endless speculation. Though Oates is neither murderer nor teen idol, she knows what public scrutiny feels like. One of America’s most innovative and prolific literary writers, Oates maintains a low profile, causing fans and critics to wonder who she really is and how she does what she does.

Not only does she write great novels, Oates has written a lot of them, 30 to date. In addition, she’s been teaching at Princeton for the past 20 years, and is releasing this month both a new collection of criticism, Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going and Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, a psychological thriller written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith.

Oates may be a brooding figure of intrigue to others, but her creativity is no mystery at all, just hard work. “I do only one work at a time. I tend to be obsessive and haunted by the work,” said the author, speaking from Princeton. “I don’t work fast but I work a long time every day. I start fairly early in the morning and go till about 1:00. I take time off in the afternoon and I teach two days a week, but then I can sometimes work again till midnight.” But attempts to demystify herself have done no good. Like John Reddy, Oates is often a figure onto whom others project their own personal myths.

The difference between how things appear and how they really are is Oates’s lifelong literary focus. Oates has never indulged her favorite theme with the playful sweetness and humor of Broke Heart Blues. Set in the 1960s, it “deals with murder and a family idealized and ostracized — ” familiar Oates turf — “but mostly it’s about kids and innocence,” said Oates. “I wanted to write about the American infatuation with high school life, of collective nostalgia. It’s not satirical, not cruel. It’s a sympathetic look at these powerful, genuine emotions we forget about when we get older.”

Articulating those volatile emotions are the assembled voices of 40 Willowsville High students Oates crafts to speak as a single, impassioned narrator. They all love John Reddy, but “Most of us at WHS, even guys who’d played varsity basketball with him . . . even the few girls who claimed to have gone out with him, would have to admit we’d never had an actual conversation with John Reddy Heart.”

“That was the most exciting part of writing the novel, putting the voices together in a kind of chorus,” said Oates. “There’s the disparity of what they imagined and what is.” The book’s middle section, written in omniscient third-person narration, is where readers find out “what is.” The real John Reddy can hardly compete with his classmates’ elaborate perceptions.

Similarly, the truth about Oates doesn’t live up to the image of her as an intense, bookish creature. She is not like Broke Heart Blues‘s Evangeline Fesnacht, who, the book tells us, grew up, left Willowsville, and became the author “E.S. Fesnacht, a voice of disturbing but penetrating insight into the tragic human condition.” The line sounds like every Oates review, but the author created Evangeline Fesnacht “as a gentle satire of my own self as I’m perceived by other people. I know my image is different, but I was captain of the basketball team, I played field hockey, I was very athletic. I belonged to many, many clubs.”

Nostalgia implies sentimentality, something of which the author could never be accused. Rather, she evokes the cauldron of adolescent yearning as though still stinging from it. “It’s a time of great excitement and imagination. All kinds of emotions are unleashed. You can be blissfully happy one day and the next really melancholy. These kids in my novel could be plunged into extremes.”

Though she calls Broke Heart Blues her happy novel, it involves strong emotions, “preppies, hoods, jocks, geeks” and other high school cliques, and murder, themes which seem to presage the high school violence of Littleton, Colorado. “Littleton has always been coming,” she said. “There have been school shootings in past years. I certainly hope there won’t be a larger one, but there will probably be other shootings. The emotions of adolescent boys have always been volatile. Now instead of getting into a fight, they get a gun.”

Boys may always be boys, but the times they live in change. Oates notes a loss of innocence in America. Compared to a generation ago, American youth is “much more catapulted into adult life, but they’re not ready for it, not emotionally.” Maybe no one ever is. Oates believes that at our core we remain the awkward, insecure people we were in high school. “That side of American men, the boyishness, is very touching,” she said, “the way they look back to the school years and still feel inadequacy. That makes them human.”

The last section of Broke Heart Blues, a 30th reunion at Willowsville High, reverts to the collective voice of the students, some settled, some bitter, all very much older. Hoping John Reddy, the mysterious outsider of their youth, will somehow appear, they discover the welter of powerful emotions they thought had died.

Thirty years on, Willowsville High students still obsess about John Reddy Heart, and 30 novels since she began writing, Oates still has the ability to surprise. “There are writers who basically write the same book, but some of us as we get older get more playful and experimental,” she said. “Broke Heart Blues is not a form I would have dreamed of using 20 years ago.”

Freewheeling with form, Oates is still driven by the same core content, probing the dark, unknowable heart, piercing the veil of appearance. She has started work on a new novel about Marilyn Monroe — someone who was, like John Reddy and his creator, an outsider. “I’ve been haunted by her image. I wanted to write about Norma Jean Baker, not Marilyn Monroe, the real person rather than the icon. In America,” she added, “we make our journeys from the outside to the inside.” Her new novel will end as Monroe’s life did — tragically.

But that’s not what Oates wanted for Broke Heart Blues. “I end it with the words, ‘we love you.’ It’s like saying we love America, and we love youth. It’s a valentine to that experience.”

Ellen Kanner has interviewed many authors for BookPage.

During pre-publication readings from her sometimes lyrical, sometimes mournful, always enthralling 12th novel, Goldengrove, Francine Prose was amazed to hear her listeners laugh.

"People laughed!" Prose exclaims during a call to the Greenwich Village home she shares with her husband, the artist Howard Michels. Prose speaks in energetic, good-humored bursts of thought. "I was surprised. Because the book seems to me so grim. But then, apparently, it is not. So I'm delighted, really."

A wicked sense of humor has been a hallmark of most of Prose's novels. Blue Angel (2000), a National Book Award finalist, is a devilishly funny, politically incorrect send-up of academic life. And her widely praised novel A Changed Man (2005) is a gleefully pointed social satire in which a disenchanted American neo-Nazi seeks redemption by teaming up with a prominent Holocaust survivor.

But Goldengrove, which takes its title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is, as Prose says, "different from any of my other books." Its humor is rarer and warmer and arises from how well Prose inhabits the body and psyche of her immensely appealing narrator, Nico, who is 13 years old during the tragic events of the summer she describes. 

"Nico has a very lively mind," Prose says. "Getting her voice right was the hardest part of the novel. I wanted the language to be very elegant and very lyrical. But with a kind of raw emotion all the way through. That's a hard balancing act. It was also challenging to remember what it was like to be that age."

"I never had a daughter, but teenagers are teenagers, and I have spent a lot of my life around teenagers."

Prose, who is the mother of two adult sons and has recently become a grandmother, says, "I never had a daughter, but teenagers are teenagers, and I have spent a lot of my life around teenagers. My younger son has read the novel and he says 'God, you've ripped off everything about our family and put it in the book.' But no one except my kids and maybe my husband would think there's anything of our family life in this novel. This family is nothing like ours. Nothing. But being my kids, they assume the only way I could have found out there was such a thing as Grand Theft Auto was to have learned it from them, because I am so ignorant otherwise."

In fact, Prose is anything but ignorant of the particulars of family life or of the inner lives of teenage family members. Goldengrove is, among many things, a very wise novel about the family dynamics of grief and loss. Within the book's first 20 pages, Nico's older, artistic, athletic, much-idolized sister Margaret has leapt from the rowboat the two sisters share on a languid summer afternoon and swum toward their family's house on the shore. This Sunday tradition is fraught with the sibling tensions and affections that are resolved only when the sisters come together again on the family's dock. But this time Margaret does not make it to the shore. Instead, inexplicably, she drowns. The remainder of the novel is about the family's floundering, occasionally triumphant efforts to deal with the incomprehensible pain of Margaret's death.

Prose began writing Goldengrove two months after the death of her mother, to whom the novel is dedicated. "Its origins were completely related to my mother's death," Prose says. "I knew it was a narrative about grief. I wanted it to be about, partly about, how one recovers from grief. But since I had no idea how to do that when I began writing the novel, I thought maybe I'd find out by the time I finished. One of the things Nico says to her father is that she walks around thinking everyone else is walking around pretending to be normal but they are suffering. That was something that was much on my mind when I was writing the book: walking down the street and thinking, yikes, everyone may be in horrible pain."

"It's not accidental that people talk about sex and death in the same sentence so often. Life does assert itself in a certain ways, especially in highly pressured circumstances."

Goldengrove is also about a 13-year-old girl coming into sexual and intellectual self-awareness under trying circumstances. Throughout the course of the novel, Nico struggles to find her authentic self in countless ways, including her relationships with boys and men. "Nico is coming of age under the worst possible circumstances," Prose says. "It's not accidental that people talk about sex and death in the same sentence so often. Life does assert itself in a certain ways, especially in highly pressured circumstances."

Prose, a fastidious stylist who is also somehow astonishingly prolific, calculates that Goldengrove went through 130 drafts before completion. She spent months changing and rechanging the adjectives in the last transporting sentence of the book. "I write every minute I can, which unfortunately is not as many minutes as I would like. The paradox is the less well received your work is, the easier it is to write because you have more time. Plus, I'm knocking on wood, I actually have a life. If my son and daughter-in-law ask me to babysit for my granddaughter, I drop everything. I would much rather hang out with her than do anything else."

Prose says she chose the book's title "about five minutes before she sent it to the publisher. I knew that Goldengrove would be the name of Nico's father's bookstore because her parents are former hippies, romantic, idealistic and poetic in a certain way. Hopkins is such a nutty writer. I love him. I remember reading him in college and not having the faintest idea what he was about. Nico reads the poem ["Spring and Fall: To a Young Child"] and doesn't have the faintest idea what it's about. And she doesn't like it. It was fun writing about it from her point of view."

"One of my hopes for the book, " Prose says at the end of our conversation, "is that Nico's search for what will help her get through her grief and loss will help others who are experiencing something similar. It certainly helped me."

Alden Mudge writes from San Francisco.

Stephen W. Hines has unearthed a trilogy of short stories by Louisa May Alcott in anticipation of the upcoming Christmas season.

Hines has previously published several very successful volumes of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writings, most notably Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings, and spoke recently with BookPage about his current project and Miss Alcott.

How did you find these stories?
Sometimes I’ll go through reference books and look for things that I think have some sort of contemporary reason for being renewed or being brought back to the public’s attention. Other times I will go with a definite plan of finding a particular piece that has intrigued me through some reference book. And sometimes I just go to a publication that I think might have something in it and leaf through it page by page and hope for serendipity to occur. It’s time-consuming, but it can be an enormous amount of fun. That’s what happened with The Quiet Little Woman. I was at the Ben West Public Library in Nashville leafing through a 1920 copy of St. Nicholas magazine, and I came across it and its background story. Miss Alcott wrote the story for the Lukens girls, five sisters who greatly admired her work and fashioned a publication, Little Things, after the March girls’ Pickwick Portfolio in Little Women. Similar to many of Miss Alcott’s other works, The Quiet Little Woman, which was originally titled Patty’s Place, is a fairly realistic story in the sense that the person is not transformed into a fairy princess or anything like that. The lead character, Patty, remains pretty much a poor person who ends up not discovering the rich family of which she daydreams. She does learn to accept her lot and her position.

Did you find the other two stories in this volume, “Tilly’s Christmas” and “Rosa’s Tale,” the same way?
Those were not found in St. Nicholas magazine. Once I became aware of how much Miss Alcott had written, I looked to see what else she had done in the way of other Christmas stories.

Will you speak about Miss Alcott’s writing career?
Miss Alcott did write rapidly, and for about 20 years, after she started writing as a professional to support herself and her family, she wrote very industriously. She could do as many as 30 pages a day with a quill pen, inkwell, and blotter. Some of her thriller types of books that she did under a pen name were completed in a month’s time. Miss Alcott did have a fairly hard time getting established at first in her writing career, but she had some early successes too. I mean compared to what a lot of writers today go through, she may have almost been said to have some fairly early encouragement. I think she published some early poetry. Although they didn’t bring much money, she did have some success with them, and her family was very supportive of her writing. She did have a lot of rejections, too. Her earlier books, Moods and Hospital Sketches, were nothing remarkable and didn’t excite public attention. She eventually did develop a relationship with the Boston publishers and was known as a dependable writer. She probably had maybe as much as eight to ten years’ worth of writing years before she became an overnight success with Little Women. I recently went through a volume of Miss Alcott’s letters and noticed a couple where she wrote about Little Women before it had actually been published. She didn’t really hold out a lot of optimism that it would be a success. She wrote one person and said that this sort of thing doesn’t sell. It turns out she was wildly inaccurate about her own book.

So Little Women was really a revolutionary sort of book?
Little Women displays many of the same qualities that one sees in The Quiet Little Woman. It’s fairly realistic, in the sense that the family has trouble and one of the characters dies. Now that wouldn’t have been necessarily unusual in those days, but it’s not done in any melodramatic way, as many of these kind of things were. The girls are allowed to be individuals and to show some rebelliousness. Jo is shown as being a person who is very independent and tomboyish, and that would not be typical. One of the reasons it caught on was because it was really different; it showed a much more realistic picture of children and yet it still was a very moral kind of book. Of course it came out in two parts originally, the second a year after the first. Part two deals with the sisters coupling up and getting married. Originally, Miss Alcott had wanted to resist the temptation to have Jo married off, but there was a lot of clamor for it so she married her off to a German professor instead of to Laurie to show her independent spirit. I suppose that many people would look at Miss Alcott today and regard her as old-fashioned, but the truth of the matter is she was very progressive for her time. She was a big supporter of women getting the vote, and she felt, as she wrote to the Lukens girls, that women had a right to do whatever they showed they could do. She showed through her writing that a woman could be a professional writer, and very successful one. Once Little Women came out, it continued to sell very well through the rest of her life. One of her royalty checks came in for $8,500.

What was your hope in publishing these stories?
My literary prospecting involves making a judgement as to whether something is of interest and worth bringing back. There is always a desire each Christmas to have a special story that catches on with the public. The Quiet Little Woman is a wonderful story for the Christmas season although it has lain unnoticed for many years now. It says in a lot of ways and more succinctly what William Bennett has been trying to convey about virtue in volumes of over 400 pages. Miss Alcott really lived out her philosophy of Ôvirtue has its own rewards.’ It doesn’t mean you necessarily marry a handsome prince in the end, but what you do does build your character. It’s a book coming at the right time for those wondering about how to infiltrate values onto our children, and I think it has a wonderful teaching to offer everyone.