It Takes a Village Idiot, by Jim Mullen.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
$23 - 288 pages.

Tales of the differences between city life and country life are as old as Aesop and as new as Jim Mullen’s It Takes A Village Idiot.

In this book, Mullen, a writer and critic, tells us of leaving his life in Manhattan, the theaters and restaurants, the apartments with loud neighbors and louder street sounds, of slowly abandoning this frenetic pace for a new life in the country. Here he still worked as a writer and critic, but now made the rounds of The Big Pig Restaurant and the A-Mart (a sort of cheap K-Mart), living in a farmhouse amid fertilized fields - the odor of the fields made a strong impression on him - and dairy farms.

Although most of us have surely read or seen numerous books and movies about such a move - Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Egg And I and The Money Pit all come immediately to mind - Mullen writes with such zest and wit that we don’t mind paying another visit to such familiar territory. In describing his wife’s purchase of a farmhouse in Upstate New York and their subsequent decision to move there, Mullen entertains us - I laughed out loud at several places in the book - by laughing not only at his neighbors, but at himself as well. Here he describes his first night in the new country house:

Beds were the only furniture in the house; there was not a chair to sit on, not a table on which to put a cup of coffee. There was no coffee. Not that you would want to drink coffee, because then you would have to use the bathroom.

Mullen’s repartee with his wife, Sue, enhances the humor of this book. Here is Mullen, who hasn’t owned a car in 20 years of living in Manhattan, after purchasing a used car and then helping his wife shop for some things for the house:

Sue sent me off with one load to put in our new car while she kept shopping. We’d rendevous at the bookstore in five minutes. Half an hour later I came back, bags still in hand, to tell her the sad news that our car had been stolen.

“You wouldn’t expect that in a small town like this, but I went to where we parked it and then I looked all over the lot, but it’s gone. Let’s call the police.”

Sue marched out into the lot, unlocked the beige Subaru wagon that was right where she had parked it, and threw the bags inside.

“It doesn’t look like they did any damage, ” I said.

“You’re an idiot, ” she replied.

What lends a special sweetness to this tale is the slow way Walleye, the fictional name given the town by Mullen, takes hold of Mullen and makes him one of its own. Most of his new neighbors are dairy farmers, men and women who are both amused and baffled by all “flatlanders” from New York. These natives are as different from the outsiders as it is perhaps possible to be in America, yet gradually Mullen comes to respect and enjoy them. Both he and Sue even become protective about their community, trying to discourage visitors who might disparage Walleye. Sue often used directions to their house as a final resort to keeping out unwanted visitors:

“You go two and a half miles past the burning tire dump, make a left onto the dirt road unless it’s raining. You have four-wheel drive, don’t you? With a good, high clearance? OK, you’ll see a sign on the left that says ‘Deer Cut- Up.’ Go about a mile past that and turn right at the house painted green and pink. When you see the falling down barn next to an old dilapidated cemetery, make a right. Go past the burned-out doublewide and drive under the high power lines for about ten minutes. None of you have pacemakers, right? They say the cancer cluster on our road is just a statistical fluke and it has nothing to do with the electricity in the wires .... ”


Fortunately for his readers, Mullen is more cordial. He invites us to pull up a chair and listen to his story, regaling us with his tales and giving us some of the wittiest writing since Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore in downtown Waynesville.)

 

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