BOOKS
HEN THEY STARTED planning
Our Towns in 2012, it looked
like James and Deborah Fal-
lows had found a clever new
way to explore the heart and
soul of flyover country. For the
next four years, with James at
the controls of their $600,000
single-engine prop airplane,
the married pair of Atlantic
writers intermittently dropped in on about 30 small towns
and cities, from seaside Eastport, Maine, to James’ hometown
of Redlands, California.
Sometimes going back once or twice, sometimes staying for
a week or even three, the couple explored the civic and socio-
economic health of such disparate American places as metro-
politan Columbus, Ohio, and dusty Ajo, Arizona. They sipped
local craft beers with the hippest, brightest, most progressive
residents to find out how they were resurrecting deindustrial-
ized towns, handling waves of immigrants, or otherwise deal-
ing with national and global changes beyond their control.
Our Towns is the couple’s account of their prolonged search
for the “heart of America.” It bills itself as a “vivid, surprising
portrait of the civic and economic reinvention” that’s happen-
ing under the radar of the national media, in places like Rapid
City, Erie, Demopolis, Holland, Bend, Sioux City, Allentown,
and Greenville.
With the Fallowses in the cockpit, you’d expect a smart,
serious, and enlightening work of high-quality journalism—a
408-page Atlantic cover piece. James has 11 previous books
under his belt, and Deborah’s writings about women, edu-
cation, and travel have appeared in The Atlantic, National
Geographic, and elsewhere. Yet this collection of small-town
snapshots is a plane wreck.
Our Towns sometimes reads like a bunch of travel notes
stapled together chronologically. Other times it feels like it
was written from 2,500 feet. It’s overloaded with chamber-of-
commerce details and laden with dull quotes from local politi-
cians and other civic big shots. Repetitive and often stale, it
contains no edge, no humor, no hate, not even any photos. It’s
the worst kind of serious journalism: the boring kind.THE FALLOWSES, WHO equitably took turns writing mini-
chapters, didn’t help things by taking four years to complete
their geographically lopsided journey. (About half of the 29
places they cover, including Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and
Burlington, Vermont, hosted them in 2013 and 2014—an eon
ago.) Their eccentric sampling of towns includes one in Texas,
none in Florida, three in Kansas, five in California, and three
in Mississippi.But the chief
reason for their book’s
page-turning tedium is how they
reported it. The authors may have aimed
to show us the hidden grassroots of America,
but their reporting is more top-down than bottom-up.
Typically, they would drop into a town and start inter-
viewing local powerbrokers and the booster class: the mayor,
the city planner, the key developers, the important business
tycoon, the president of the college, the principal of the most
innovative high school, the editor of the dying newspaper, the
head librarian, the “outsized” local personality. The authors66 OCTOBER 2018
A Flyby Analysis of Flyover Country
Two Atlantic writers tour America in a tiny plane and manage to miss nearly
everything that really matters.
BILL STEIGERWALD
W