Dreaming rural life

A book of essays is not ideal for a period of enforced idleness. There’s just too much time to zip through them, enjoying the moment but failing to savour the full pleasure of a really well constructed piece. Of course, I promise myself I’ll return, and maybe I will. But a honking big novel is a far better prospect when one has hours to enjoy rather than a quick read to snatch before sleep.

That said, and despite the presence of a honking big novel beside it on the bedside table, I am devouring Third Person Rural at a rate of knots. A friend, one who has never once given me a bum steer on a book, gave it to me last Christmas; what a treat. Noel Perrin is new to me, but he joins a canon of American writers on rural life who manage to deal with the everyday and the extraordinary with wit and verve and the kind of writing that fills me with two kinds of envy; to write as they do, and to live a life like that they write about. David Klein, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Ward Sinclair, Henry Mitchell; all make me long for their lives and their talent.

Perrin writes as a part-time farmer in rural Vermont. He does so with such clarity and style, such an ability to skip from the general to the particular and back again, that before you know it a quick dip into the first of his essays on the months of the year has ended 12 months and 12 essays later with a new appreciation of the seasons of Vermont and the sickening realization that you have gobbled an entire third of the book without meaning to.

Of course, a little research reveals that Perrin was not exactly an average city slicker seeking a simpler life. A Professor of English and writer of much more than rural ramblings, he once wrote to a friend: “I currently spend half my time teaching at Dartmouth, half farming and half writing. That this adds up to three halves I am all too aware.” And, of course, as another friend once told me, that’s the secret to the life all those authors limn. It isn’t their only life.

I may be able to stretch out Third Person Rural for another day or two before I have to fall on the honking big novel, but I am also going to be on the lookout for more of Perrin’s books of essays. By the time I find them I’ll probably not be idle and will therefore enjoy them all the more.

[rating: 5]