Joseph A. Conforti has been helping us understand Maine for quite some time. He arrived in 1987 to establish an American and New England Studies Program at USM that trained educators and historians. Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity, did what the subtitle says. Conforti edited the best book on our metropolis, Creating Portland, but still can’t fully explain why there’s no great Portland novel.
His new book, Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country, discusses great novels from the rest of Maine, beginning with Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) and nearing the present with Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys (2013) and Monica Wood’s memoir, When We Were the Kennedys (2012).
Hidden Places isn’t literary criticism. It isn’t history of the book. It’s a study of how authors have been influenced by Maine places, and have worked to describe and explain those places, and sometimes reshape them in our imaginations. It isn’t a history, but Conforti seems comfortable with the idea of a good story as good history.
As you read Hidden Places you may feel the need to interrupt the author to start reading a novel he describes. Go ahead: have two or three books near your chair! If you’ve already read a work he discusses, you may find you want to read it again; or feel the need to explore other works he describes and analyses.
In confining himself to a manageable topic, Conforti has had to leave out some important writing about Maine. You shouldn’t do that: Thoreau on The Maine Woods, Wesley McNair’s fine anthology The Maine Poets… And of course, as Conforti notes, Stephen King has made Maine known beyond the reach of many other authors through his crime fiction as well as “straight” horror: try The Colorado Kid (about a Maine coastal town, despite the title).
Some of Hidden Places’ authors wrote historical fiction; others, contemporary fiction that became historical. And some are telling it like it is today: Elizabeth Strout on Somalis in Lewiston; Richard Russo and Monica Wood on “The Mill Town in Turmoil” (Chapter 7).
I’ve finished Hidden Places. Somehow I’ve never read Empire Falls. Now I will.
David R Jones was fortunate to be one of Joe Conforti’s students.
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