Jackson is one of those hopeless-case cities that are cited in magazines at the very bottom when they list America’s most livable communities, one of those working-class locales where they’re all repairing cars in the front yard and otherwise having fights and breaking beer bottles over the nearest head. The houses aren’t painted, and the siding is falling off. They’ll kill you for a nickel and steal anything that isn’t nailed down. What can I say? Folks there are enjoying themselves any way they can.
When class warfare erupts in America, as it must within the next decade, it’ll start in Jackson, probably. Those citizens are not being fooled.
Charles Baxter. The Feast of Love. New York: Vintage (2001) 216.
Apparently, The Feast of Love has been turned into a movie starring Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear and Radha Mitchell. I haven’t seen it yet, but, judging by the wikipedia plot summary, I probably wouldn’t like it, at least not as much as the book.
For example, I think it is vital to the story that the action takes place in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The movie is set in Portland, Oregon. I love that city – but I think it is important that the novel is set in the Midwest, in a uncool, ordinary, middle-of-nowhere town with even ‘uncooler’ towns nearby. Yet, Ann Arbor being home of the University of Michigan, it still provides the possibility that one of the neighbors/characters in the book is a liberal philosophy professor.. The extraordinariness of the (abstract) concept of ‘love’ is set in contrast to the ordinariness of the surrounding.
Thoughts?