The Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout
Conforti sometimes gets grief for preferring Strout’s 2013 novel, about the fallout from an alleged hate crime in a fictional Maine mill town, to the author’s Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge. But The Burgess Boys, he says, is a worthier effort. “It’s an ambitious work, and it acknowledges some diversity in Maine,” Conforti says. “Strout spent time studying the Somali community, getting to know some of the Somali people. They invited her into their homes. She would go and park her car at a school and see if the Somali kids and the native-born kids were interacting, if they were playing with one another. She’s someone who has strong ties to Lewiston, and The Burgess Boys is essentially about Lewiston as a community.”
Empire Falls
by Richard Russo
“Long and involved and certainly an ambitious book,” Conforti says of Russo’s Pulitzer winner, published in 2001. A tragicomedy about blue-collar interior Maine, Empire Falls feels a world away from Sarah Orne Jewett, but as with The Country of the Pointed Firs, the reader comes to understand the place by understanding its people. Seemingly no citizen of the titular fading factory town is denied his or her own plot arc in a novel that Conforti calls “an artful act of literary jugglery.”
HONORABLE MENTIONS
A few other titles dissected in Hidden Places that deserve a shout among our 100 must-reads:
Papa Martel
by Gérard Robichaud
A 1961 chronicle of a Franco-American family and its Tevye-like patriarch that Conforti calls “the best thing we have in depicting some of the interior of the Franco community in a mill city.”
Come Spring
by Ben Ames Williams
Published in 1940, an epic, fictionalized account of the founding of the town of Union. Clocks in at 800 pages and reads like Steinbeck Lite.
Ernie’s Ark
by Monica Wood
The poignant tale of a strike in a paper town, told from multiple perspectives. “Realistic, humane, and gracefully written,” Conforti writes.