I’m currently reading a novel, North of Patagonia by Johnny Payne. A major part of it is set in Chicago, a city I have lived in oor near for over 4 decades. And it got me thinking whether being familiar with a novel’s setting added or detracted from my enjoyment of it.
On one hand, it is kind of thrilling to see street and place names you are familiar with in print on a novel’s pages.
OTOH, however, I sort of feel like I have to have an analytical/critical part of my brain going that I might not otherwise engage in this manner. And while that adds to the experience in one way, in others it somewhat detracts.
-Are his descriptions consistent with the real world - i.e. does he live at the intersection of 2 paralell streets?
-In some ways, because I am familiar with the specific names, they jump out at me. I sort of feel like they might be tossed in to provide the “appearance” of familiarity with the area, instead of using more creative ways to set the mood of the place. So they subtly interfere with the flow as I read.
-Perhaps most importantly, I find myself constantly checking whether his assessment of a place perfectly jives with mine. Too often I think of the author characterzing a place, instead of accepting a character’s description.
Just wondering if any of you had thoughts/experiences similar to or different from mine.
I was about halfway through Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale before I realized that it was set in a very recognizable Cambridge, MA. I knew all the places in the book. Looking up the author’s bio, I saw that she did, indeed, live in Cambridge, although the bulk of the book was written elsewhere. It’s all the more interesting because she doesn’t identify the setting explicitly. Having rebellious feminists hung up in Harvard Yard, though, is a bizarre thought, especially when you consider that Cambridge is such a hotbed of liberalism that it’s jokingly referred to as The People’s Republic of Cambridge.
Tom Clancy sets some of his books in and around Annapolis. I know the landmarks. It was keen until I read the part about the rush-hour car chase over the severn river bridge. No way! You could walk across the bridge faster.
Many, if not all, of Elmore Leonard’s recent books are set in the Detroit area and he’s pretty accurate since he lives here. He’ll use landmarks that only those of us who live here know about.
Spider Robinson’s Lifehouse is set in Vancouver, as are a couple of Will Gibson’s short stories. Kinda weird in both cases… (Granville Island looks like what?)
Back when I was a student at Cornell University, I read the book Fool on the Hill, which is very conspicuously set there. In general I thought this enhanced the book. At one point in particular there’s a scene with a truck trying to drive the hero off the road. As he’s racing uphill, I’m starting to get worried because Iknow there’s a sharp turn coming up that he’ll wipe out on. And indeed he did.
OTOH, I was watching the film Along Came a Spider, set in D.C., where I now live. At one point the kidnapper is leading Det. Cross (Morgan Freeman) on a merry chase, having him run from landmark to landmark, all of which I recognize (and I know how tough it would be to run from one to the next). Then, Cross gets on the Metro (our subway system), and the next scene is of them on a train that has absolutely no resemblance to the ones I rode to work every morning. That really blew the suspension of disbelief for me.
I really appreciate all the IDs, but could you add a little mention of how such familiarity affected your reading experience.
Love the story about the hill Cliffy. Must have really made for a memorable reading experience. And Cal, that must have been neat realizing the location partway through. Was the novel set in historical times? I’m not familiar with it.
I wonder if I approach/judge a work differently if it is set in Chicago, instead of say NYC or Kansas, which I am very unfamiliar with. I think I am more demanding of a book where I know the setting. Perhaps the same way I would be if one of the characters shhared one of my interests, such as gardening, golf, or martial arts.
And don’t even get me started on geographical film continuity. Just watched The Blues Brothers with my kids. Drove them nuts shouting, “How the hell did they get northbound on South LSD while driving to downtown Chi from Wisconsin? Wait, now their heading west. They just passed their destination. Where the heck are they now? …”
Christopher Morley’s “Kitty Foyle” (yes, it got made into a Ginger Rogers movie) is set in the Philadelphia Main Line, where I grew up. There are a lot of inside jokes, like characters being named after local towns or streets, and lines like “People from the Main Line are very nice to those below their station—as long as the station isn’t below Overbrook,” which are incomprehensible to outsiders.
I highly recommend Morley, by the way—one of those terrific, once popular, now utterly forgotten writers. Did a number of novels, and some great nonfiction essays and travel pieces, too…
Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels are set in Richmond and environs. Inside references abound.
I tagged along for the final inspection of Cornwell’s house when it was being built - unbelievably nice. I also met her when she was keeping her helicopter at the New Kent County Airport. I’d tell you about her, but my dear old grandmother always told me to say nothing about a person if you couldn’t say something nice.
A bunch of Stephen King novels are set in COlorado. The Shining was in Estes Park, about 2 hrs west of here and The Stand was in Boulder, about 20 minutes West.
Also, Denver is Missing by D.F. Jones deals with the area.
A bunch of Heinlein novels (Door into Summer, ummmm…The Star Beast? and at least one other were set in Colorado (primarily Colorado Springs, about 1.5 hours SE.
Let’s see… Gone With The Wind, and also Scarlett were partially set in Charleston. The only thing that struck me was that Scarlett goes down to the City Market to buy food, whereas if you get scammed into a carriage tour here, idiot tour guides will swear that the City Market was where slaves were sold. (Scarlett would have shopped for food there. The “official” slave market was somewhere completely different.)
Alexandra Ripley also has a couple of other novels set here, including (duh) Charleston, and On Leaving Charleston. I’ve only read Charleston, and only a little bit of it. It wasn’t that great, but it was interesting to be able to say I lived down the street from some of the locations.
On a side note, my friends’ band was mentioned by name in a Patricia Cornwell novel, Hornet’s Nest, at a club I had seen them perform at. That was pretty cool, too.
I enjoyed his Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, books about books which seemed to have semi-cult status with some people when I was in college. “Now utterly forgotten,” huh? Well, that pretty much dates me.
I am not bothered by real geographic detail in books that are trying for realism, but I do think it can be distracting where reality isn’t the point that the author is going for–if you want to make a universal statement about people, tying your story too closely to a particular time and place can weaken your argument, and make it “dated.”
As for the movies, I think we had the most fun with the Chicago locations in Adventures in Babysitting, followed closely by Ferris Buehler.
I spent the Best Years of My Life in the “Other Oregon”. East of the mountains: high desert, no annoying trees, wind that blows forever. Two novels had a deeper impact on me because of this.
Cryptomnicom, Stephenson. In one chapter (“Origin”) the author describes an area quite close to where I was born in a way that struck home big time. Even had stories about chasing whirlwinds just like I did as a kid. Not at all a large part of the book but a key metaphor is presented. I was already loving the book and when I hit that chapter…
Dune, Herbert. “But wait, that’s set on a fictional planet, etc.” you say. Im my edition, at the end, it points out that Herbert was inspired to write Dune after visiting Eastern Oregon. Something I had already deduced as I was reading it. To me it really seemed like reading about “home”. (Frank Herbert trivia bonus points: pronounce “Sequim”, the town in WA where he had lived.)
I agree with the others that Movies/TV shows set in your hometown are a disappointment. “Hey, they’re driving the wrong way on Broadway…” etc. Hollywood types don’t give a s**t. Good novelists do.
I read A Cold Day In Paradise this summer. I don’t actually live in Paradise, but I do live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so close enough. The book was pretty accurate in terms of locations and details like that. However, he did make a mistake that really ticked me off. There’s a very common U.P. saying “eh”. As in “Say yah to da U.P., eh?” He spelled it “ay” instead of “eh.” It was still a very good book, but I had a hard time getting past that.
–“Take off, eh” “Hosers!”
Living in Manhattan, I run into this quite a lot. One of my favorite authors is Lawrence Block who sets all his Matt Scudder detective stories in the neighborhood I lived in for many years.
He is extremely accurate about places in the book and it increases my enjoyment when he talks about restaurants I have been to, hospitals I know, etc. He even gives correct locations for AA meetings around town.
If there were inaccuracies, it would probably bother me.
Speaking of Tom Clancy, he placed the Bay Area city of Sunnyvale in Southern California in the Bear and the Dragon book. The military details were right, as he put a recon satellite receiving station here, which is here in real life as well (the Blue Cube). But when the character gets a call from Pres. Ryan he hops on a plane to Washington from LAX. That’d be just a bit out of the way.
One more inaccuracy: In the first issue of the comic book Brigade (a rampant piece of unmitigated crap – Liefeld’s first Youngblood spin-off, for those of you who know what that means), the team is called to a hostage crisis at The Somethingorother Towers. There’s a panel picturing the Towers as this huge skyscraper, at least 40 stories high. Unfortunately, they’re located in D.C. Even the tallest buildings in this town stop at around the 15th floor, as no structure is allowed to be taller than the Capitol. I’ve lived here almost six years and I’ve never seen any supermodern skyscrapers.