What I Am Reading: "Stillwater" by William F. Weld

This was a weird experience - reading a coming-of-age novel in the place, more or less, where I came of age; set in the context of its most defining event, which is still within living memory. Even stranger to have that novel written by the man who was governor of the state, if not during my adolescence, then at least when I was born.

Yes it's Bill Weld, Massachusetts' most colorful recent governor, the WASP dilettante who was considered by most to have done a reasonable job, who was elected in a very bizarre election in 1990 and was overwhelmingly re-elected in 1994 (but did not beat John Kerry for Senate in 1996). Bill Weld, who, with the restlessness of the old elite, wrote novels for a while in the late '90s/ early 2000s, before he went off to try for a farcical political career in New York. He wrote two political farces (coming up) and this novel about the Quabbin Reservoir.

My family isn't from the Quabbin region, my parents moved there from Worcester shortly before I was born. That does makes me "from there" , and the place has a strong sense of local history (as does much of New England, an old region organized on a granular level). The flooding of the four towns is remembered more with wistfulness than anger, and there is definitely a strong outdoors(wo)man culture associated with hiking in and otherwise interacting with the reservoir landscape. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Quabbin, not as much as some; and I have spoken with long-time residents, local historians, people familiar with the region’s geography, an older gentleman who underwent a similar displacement in his youth seventy or so years ago, a couple of towns over. There is a gathering of former residents of the four towns every year, some of them relatives of my high school classmates. I was lucky to engage with my home region twice: first upon growing up in the area, when you don't really think much about where you are from because you've never lived anywhere else; and then in five years of political work after I returned from college. This was when I engaged with the region on a much more intellectual level, able to compare it with other places and other lived experiences. It was really then that I became a New Englander, since there were other things I could have been.

Anyway, the novel. It is weird. It is a meandering story of a teenaged boy's experience of the last years of Prescott, Dana, Enfield, and Greenwich, in 1937 and up to the flooding in 1938. It has some interesting details that I never paid much attention to before, like how barren things would have been at the end after the buildings were torn down (and how much work it must have been to cut the woods). The book doesn't have a strong narrative through line, and is full, I mean FULL, of hazy, idyllic rural reminisces: fishing, cooking, hunting, playing, more fishing. All the Calvin and Hobbes stuff. The Quabbin story lends itself well to this setting, as it is set both spatially and temporally in the slingshots-and-ice-boxes world of Norman Rockwell's small-town New England.

The story makes a couple of interesting narrative choices. The political impetus for the project comes from Governor James Michael Curley, the infamously crooked and roguish Boston politician. However, though Curley was involved in the Quabbin project, he left the corner office in 1937, or just as the story was starting, and would not have been the one to command the laborers (“Curley’s Woodpeckers,” that does ring true to me as a nickname) in the final stages of the project, or give the reassuring speeches. The other narrative choice that raised my eyebrow was the decision to add a fifth Quabbin town, Ripton. Ripton is a Western Massachusetts in-joke, a fake town that legislators sneak into the budget to "prove" that the Boston power structure has no knowledge of Western Mass. You can even find a driving direction for it on the marker in s town center. I assume Weld used it for when he needed to shape geography, physical and social, to his convenience, but it did take me out of the story somewhat.

There is some plot in the back half, the revelation of nefarious forces working to keep the local residents docile in the face of their impending displacement. One of these forces is a fire-and-brimstone preacher, another is the state legislator, Lawyer (Carl) Kincaid. The Quabbin region's last real legislator was in fact Leslie Haskins, who mostly kept quiet out of his connections to Republican leadership. I am hoping to learn more about this aspect of things in a Quabbin history book I have on my plate, by local historian J.R. Greene (who gave me that factoid as well). There is also a good-guy sheriff, I'm not sure whom he may be based upon.

The book was a bit pompous, a bit stilted, a bit grandiose. However, I still felt a connection to it, especially in mid-November as I prepared to head home for Thanksgiving (the most New England holiday of all, barring perhaps Halloween). It was a good book to settle down with for a little while, and reflect in this season of reflection.