Before the action of Where You Are
begins, before the prologue, Michael Burns places a quotation from “Plain Song Talk,’ a poem by Richard Eberhart, who taught at Dartmouth and is – at least in part -a New Hampshire poet. In four lines, Eberhart mentions the hopes of youth, diminishing powers, sufferings old and new, doubt, and death. That quotation should bring many readers to a halt – right there! Who wants to spend time with that group of losers, perhaps attractive or at least acceptable at Elsinore, or on the North Shore of Long Island, or in some hick town in Pennsylvania, but not on the stage of Garrison, New Hampshire?
You may think that you’ve been to Garrison already, guided by Grace Metalious, but Peyton Place, just up the proverbial road, is a cheerful place in contrast to the depressing neighborhood Burns creates for Paul, his hapless hero, who, as the novel begins, looks back from 1998 at the newly minted bridegroom he was in August 1963.
Except for two years in the Army – he got as far as Inchon, Korea, but not in combat – Paul has lived all his life in Garrison. His father ran a bakery there, Paul went to Garrison High School, and married Laura Sargent, a Garrison girl, valedictorian of the class behind Paul’s, an “intellectual” whom he’d barely noticed back in the day. Enter our heroine! For reasons not entirely clear (but ‘love’ in a small town is usually never clear), Laura and Paul start their journey towards matrimony with a movie date to see La Dolce Vita, which he doesn’t understand – “symbolism” was not a word used by the Garrison High English Department. Laura tells Paul that his high I.Q. attracted her attention when she was working in the principal’s office.
She begins to “improve” him as their relationship deepens, dazzling him with her enthusiasm for learning and knowledge and urging him to think ahead to attending the University. In every way she is a class act – beauty, brains and, by the way, she has a trust fund.
Actually, Laura leaves the stage before the curtain rises. Paul returns from his job at Caplan’s Auto Supply to find his bride of less than a year not doing the Times crossword puzzle. A note scribbled on the back of an envelope informs him “I can’t take it anymore. Love, L.”
“It” is Garrison, of course. To understand that, Paul has to look with fresh eyes at his until now comfortable and familiar world. The author makes us see in more than Dickensian fashion the physical, mental, and emotional squalor of the town and its inhabitants closest to Paul. Everything goes wrong for him, from losing his job to losing his cockatiel and cat. More importantly, he finds himself drawn to Laura’s friend Noelle, who quickly establishes herself in his bed. Paul also finds himself returning to cigarettes and hard liquor.
For most of the novel, Laura is, as Burns tells us, “a face in the misty light’ for Paul, phoning him and finally revealing that she is in San Francisco and determined to bring him there to join her in a new and better life. A series of flashbacks reveals Laura’s personality, attractive and ambitious for herself and Paul. She is almost too good to be true, save her bossy and persistent nature.
The jolt of JFK’s death and the televised death of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. push Paul to make his decision about the world beyond Garrison. Bums gives his readers an epilogue in which the sun always seems to shine and the sordid shadows of Garrison fade into half–remembered memory.
