Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio might be the ur-text of that dreaded contemporary beast: the collection of linked short stories. Set in a town much like the one Anderson grew up in in northern Ohio around the turn of the 20th century, Anderson's stories are linked by the presence of George Willard, a young teenager and the only employer of the local newspaper, who by virtue of his vocation is privy in a way no one else is to the private lives of Winesburgians. Winesburg is a conventional sort of place, an every-town; Anderson emphasizes this--I have no idea if intentionally--by naming every other character Will or Tom or some variation thereof. But the people that populate the stories are anything but unconventional; or, perhaps it would be right to say that they are conventional in that they reveal what eccentricities lie beneath the conventional surface of every small town dweller.

George is a sensitive man, a deep thinker. He is young, and coming into many revelations about himself and his place in the world. (The virtuoso passage above is George, coming to a realization about the role of happenstance in his life, and its brevity.) Like many sensitive men, he feels that he alone is sensitive, and feels more deeply than others. But Winesburg, Ohio suggests that everyone feels this way, as if they are a little too strange for the world around them. Some of the Winesburgians are genuine oddballs, like the savage proto-incel Wash Williams, who insists to George that all women are dead inside, or Doctor Reefy, who keeps a pocket full of balled-up papers and seems to have zero patients. Others are just anxious about being oddballs, as in the story "Queer," about the son of a unpopular shopowner who becomes obsessed with the idea that other people think he's weird. He flirts with a friendship with George, thinking the newspaper man can put his story right, but then pushes him away; convinced--for no reason--that George, too, thinks he's "queer," he rushes him in the night and attacks him--thus becoming the thing he fears.

I loved the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that deal with longing and desire. George pines for a small sequence of girls, each of whom pines for him or someone else; they are all in love with love, as the saying goes, but unable to really love or even see the objects of their affection. One of the most powerful stories is "Adventure," about a woman who believes her boyfriend when he tells her he will come back to marry her. She waits and waits, until she realizes that she has grown old waiting (old in 1910 terms, so, like, thirty) and rushes out naked into a rainstorm as a kind of cathartic release, or collapse. The story "Loneliness" captures a timeless truth when one character tells George, "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her"--the great ambivalence of human connection.

Winesburg, Ohio sounds like it ought to be one of those dreary 19th century realist works, something on par with Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. (Though I do like those books, I think you have to admit they are a little tedious and unimaginative stylistically.) But it really stands shoulders above those; in places its quite strange and modernist-sounding. In other moments it resembles Willa Cather, who had just published her first novels when Winesburg came out in 1919. Like Cather, Anderson captures a time and a place--a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--but the truths within feel as true as ever.