Reviews for Population: 485

The average rating for Population: 485 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-09-12 00:00:00 Martin Bonsen WARNING: Possibly ill-advised, slightly intoxicated soap-boxing lies ahead. Proceed at your own risk. The title of this book is slightly misleading in that it implies Michael Perry will introduce the reader to a rich, quirky swath of characters who inhabit a very small town. While there are a few folks who shine through, such as Beagle the cock-eyed firefighter, [i]Population: 485[/i] is mostly a detailed account of what goes into being a volunteer firefighter. For that, I appreciated it as this is a subset of the American populace I have given little thought to and I enjoy learning about trades/hobbies/subsets that I would otherwise never learn about. Mostly, Perry just describes different calls he has gone on: Cutting a woman from the wreckage of her car; pursuing a drunken man from another car wreck through the snowy Wisconsin woods until the police (the people paid to deal with such things) showed up; resuscitating a dairy farmer who had collapsed in his barn and setting up a piece of plywood to blockade the cow shit and piss raining on him from every direction. These are pretty good stories and I enjoyed reading them for the most part, though somehow this book failed to entirely rivet me. It's well written enough; Perry can certainly weave a sentence (though one can feel him straining for the kind of deep thoughts that breed philosophical immortality), and his first-aid action sequences can be quite suspenseful. And yet, his manly-literary cultivation didn't jibe for me with his parallel self-assessment as a small-town rube at heart. It's not that I want him to look, talk and sound like a hick... I guess I just expect someone as well read as Perry, and as deeply insightful as he struggles to be, to be a little more critical of the world around them. I have been to small towns such as the one depicted in this book. I dated a lovely girl from much less lovely Prineville, Oregon, and spent countless hours in that town, with her family and friends. While I saw plenty of the good ol' down-home kindness, trust, and friendliness that drips off every page of [i]Population: 485[/i], I also saw plenty of poverty-line alcoholism, emotional and physical violence, and the kind of ignorant, deluded, traditionalist conservatism that gets people like Bush into office and gives people like McCain and Sara Palin a viable, terrifying chance. I saw this everywhere I went in that small town, and in other small towns like it, and I am pretty sure if it is like that in Oregon small towns it's almost certainly like that in Wisconsin small towns. I don't consider myself a bleeding heart liberal; I like to think I am tolerant and open to all points of view. As I said, I've experienced great kindness and generosity in small towns, but time after time I've also experienced a kind of self-destruction. A bull-headed demographic that often hurts itself with its personal and political choices, then puts up stubborn resistance to anything different. Now, this may be a bad time for me to write this... I'm slightly drunk and terrified of the huge impact Sara Palin is having on our country, the love her lies and vitriol and spite is pulling forth from the very people and towns Perry is writing about. I'm sick and tired of misinformed, uneducated folks buying this garbage and I want to cry at the thought of another four years of an administration that cares nothing for the very people who happily, thoughtlessly elect it into office because it looks pretty and gleefully offers no change whatsoever and subsequently no challenge to our "cherished" American values. Because of the mood I'm in, Perry's book didn't feel like a loving ode to the quaintness of small-town livin' but an inflated, incurious glossing of the facade of a dark underbelly. I admire Perry's selfless choice to be a first-response emergency technician who doesn't even get paid for what he does, but I also can't believe that when he says he goes out on over a hundred calls a year, that he does not face the true blights under the surface of Americana every week. My questions are, why has the dairy farmer collapsed in his barn from heart failure? Why did the woman have to be pried from her car that was cut open like a tin can? The cynical part of me says the answers are because he ate nothing but meat and potatoes every day of his life and probably smoked a pack a day as well, and because she was drunk as fuck, or run off the road by someone else who was drunk as fuck. Of course, such problems plague even the most cosmopolitan walks of life, but the thing is, the cosmopolitans have no shortage of informed, articulate critics to keep us in check. Perry propagates himself shamelessly as a well-read, literate observer of the human race and its issues, and thus should be the best equipped to analyze both the highs and the lows of the place he allegedly loves. Instead, he is content to describe yet another situation that involved administering CPR or ramming a tube down some poor rube's throat, then gets back to his good ol' boy roots fishin' for carp or huntin' some deer. If I wasn't currently blaming places like New Auburn, the town Perry calls home, for instilling fear and shame in me of this country, I might let this slide. But I am, and so I want more from an intellect who has contributed to both NPR and the New Yorker. Maybe it's silly to project my animosity on a book about firefighting that was published in 2002, but the Bush administration was already in full swing by then, and Perry was and is embedded in the thick of the world that made it happen. That he not only fails to acknowledge that fact but seems entirely unaware of it, makes me view his relentless rural poeticizing as the literary equivalent of lipstick on a pig. Indeed, the entire ruse of the wholesomeness of small-town America is the greatest lip-sticked pig of them all, the very poison at the heart of our country's most fundamental problems. And any alleged "literature" written in this century by allegedly intelligent people that refuses to acknowledge that truth shall never be embraced by my heart, no matter how easy to read it is.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-05-28 00:00:00 Michael Foster Oh my goodness. I have found my new favorite writer. I wish I had read this book before "Truck", as it prefaces a lot of events in that one, but what do you do. Michael Perry's ability to put into words the people, situations and feelings he encounters is beautiful. I love the area he's from, and it reminds me of the time I spent in Warroad, Minnesota. My favorite paragraph describes his predicament of being a dyed-in-the-wool hick from a small town, but also having the heart and mind of a writer: "I am impeded by restraint. I avoid bar brawls. Heck, I avoid bars. I don't bowl. I can't polka. In New Auburn, this last is bigger than you think. The standards against which you are measured are dependent on the milieu. Go to the cafe for meatloaf, or watch the old men roll dice at the inplement store, and listen: "He's quite a worker." "That boy can knock the stuffing out of a softball." "The man can flat run a wrench." "His checks are good." "She's a helluva shot." Not frequently overheard: "He crafts a lovely metaphor." He also has a great website: www.sneezingcow.com I am hoping that he's writing up a storm so I can enjoy more and more.