Miller’s Valley (2016)
Anna Quindlen (1953)
271 pages
It's a wiggly word, "progress": a two-lane gravel road turned into four lanes paved that makes life a noisy misery for the people with houses there, a cornfield turned into a strip mall with a hair salon, a supermarket, and a car wash. Corn's better than a car wash. We washed our own cars with a garden hose until our kids got old enough to do it for us. (5)Over a period of decades the families of a tiny farming community in a secluded Appalachian valley of central Pennsylvania find themselves increasingly at the mercy of floodwaters in Anna Quindlen’s engaging novel Miller’s Valley. But despite requiring sump pumps that over the years come to be running nearly continuously, and enduring rain storms that sometimes lift the water level to their front steps, the townspeople long balk at and obstruct government representatives who frequent their town ever more often with proposals to buy out homes so that the area can be turned into a reservoir. Their families have lived in the valley for many generations, and they are loathe to give up their homesteads and their way of life.
The Millers, living on farmland that’s been in the family for some 200 years, give the valley, and the novel, its name. The story follows the life of Mary Margret Miller, Mimi, a young girl on the verge of adolescence in the mid-1960’s when talk of converting the valley into a reservoir begins in earnest. Her oldest brother already married and living near his job in Philadelphia, Mimi lives a bucolic life with her parents and her second, teenage brother, Tommy. The tranquil isolation of the valley has lent Mimi and her family, as well as their neighbors in the community, a sense of enduring permanence --- but this cherished stability begins to dissolve in the face of the reality of the steadily rising water table, as well as the dramatic social and political changes of the 1960’s.
For many years, the troubling inundation of water seems to be only another element of the natural world that can be, simply must be, accommodated; the water may win some battles, but with hard work and ingenuity the families expect to win the war. The increasingly invasive presence of the outside world, on the other hand, proves more ineluctable for the valley’s residents. The persistent and ever increasing pressure exerted by visiting government officials to convince families to sell their homes and relocate so that the reservoir can be created, serves as Mimi’s initial glimpse into the power of outside forces to penetrate into the heart of the isolated valley, and thereby affect her life as well as that of her family and neighbors. And while the government threatens to impose this radical change on the valley at some uncertain point in the future, the Vietnam War leaves its mark quickly and harshly, a dramatic reminder that the valley is no longer the quiet and secluded home it once was. As Mimi passes through high school these outside forces compel her to begin thinking more intently and broadly about her own future, to reassess her relationship to the disappearing valley of her childhood.
An aspect of the story that I particularly enjoyed was the wonderful job Quindlen has done in creating the language and mannerisms of her characters. I grew up in a small town only a few hundred miles west of the central Pennsylvanian setting of the story, and though my hometown was less isolated than the fictional Miller’s valley, I was immediately transported back to the social environment of my youth by both the phrases the characters used, as well as the often curt and clipped, if still friendly, ways in which they interacted with one another.
Another more widespread characteristic associated with small towns also plays a role in Quindlen’s story: carefully hidden secrets, motivations and fears that can seethe just below the surface both within and between families. For the residents of Miller’s valley these become ever more difficult to hide in the face of the upheavals caused by the rising tide of both water and modernity, as young and old find their lives and friendships upended. Though some become nostalgic for the valley’s earlier isolated innocence, others find an opportunity to break free of smothering, small-town frictions and expectations.
Ultimately, Miller’s Valley is a powerful coming of age story, as Mimi, her family, and the community around them grapple with a dramatically and rapidly changing world. As Mimi observes at a critical moment in her own life, one which offers radically different choices for her future : "I just sat there, amazed at the way the whole world had just tilted while we were sitting at the table." (202)
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