The Town is a 1950 novel by Conrad Richter. It is the third installment in a trilogy of novels collectively called "The Awakening Land", and was proceeded by The Trees (1940) and The Fields (1946).
The time frame runs from sometime 1815-1820 or so to 1861. Protagonist Sayward Wheeler, who was the daughter of a frontier family in the first novel and a young bride in the second novel, is now a middle-aged mother of ten children, nine surviving. Her husband Portius is having some success as a lawyer, and the Wheeler family is upwardly mobile. Change is coming to Ohio, with the Wheeler's home town of Moonshine Gulch getting a name change to "Americus" and growing by leaps and bounds as industrialization and railroads come to the Midwest.
The main protagonists are Sayward and her youngest child, Chancey. Sayward is an old-fashioned frontier woman who believes in hard work and sweat and is most comfortable in a log cabin. Chancey, in his youth a pampered child due to a supposedly sickly constitution, grows up into an arrogant, spoiled adult, who scorns his mother's belief in work as an end in itself. The conflict between the two of them is symbolic of the growing pains as backwoods frontier society became more urban and civilized over the first half of the 19th century.
Tropes:
- Afraid of Blood: Chancey faints when he sees a bloodletting. Chancey, acutely aware of his status as a wuss, is humiliated.
- Call-Back: There are references to Left Hanging plot threads from earlier in the series. Her father Worth, who abandoned the family some 35 years earlier and lit out for the West, returns; he's been hunting and trapping ever since. Also, Sayward finds out what happened to her little sister Sulie, who disappeared in the forest in the first novel; she was kidnapped by the Lenape (Delaware) Indian tribe and after decades living with them is fully assimilated.
- The Captivity Narrative:
- Jonathan Penny, a resident of Americus, claims that he was kidnapped by the "Injuns" as a child and spent years growing up with them.
- That may be BS, but years later Sayward discovers that it really happened with her sister Sulie. Sayward finds Sulie, who disappeared in the forest decades ago, living as a fully assimilated Lenape, speaking in You No Take Candle English and refusing to acknowledge that Sayward is her sister. Sayward can't make up her mind whether or not it was better not to know, or whether or not it would have been better for Sulie to have died as a child.
- The City vs. the Country: A running theme. Sayward is a "woodsy", namely, a native of the frontier who is most comfortable living in a log cabin and working the fields to grow her own food. She is highly resistant when Portius, who has become a wealthy judge and wants to live in style, insists on abandoning the cabin and building a fancy brick house in town. Sayward is increasingly discontent when Americus gets more and more industrialized and paved over. Her son Chancey is the stereotypical spoiled rich kid, but also a self-righteous socialist spoiled rich kid, who thinks the frontier person's attachment for hardship and the old ways is ridiculous. He even writes an anonymous poem in the newspaper mocking his own mother, who owns most of what is being turned into Americus (her family was there first), and has been fighting against the growth and industrialization of the town.
- Death of a Child: Sayward is grief-stricken when Gerty, daughter to the missing Guerdon and her favorite grandchild, sickens and dies.
- Delicate and Sickly: Chancey, who is born small and weak and supposedly with a bad heart. It's ambiguous as to just how ill he was and how much he was simply pampered by his mother and his siblings; the suggestion is that he was never really that ill.
- Driven to Suicide: Even after Rosa and Chancey discover their half-sibling Surprise Incest relationship, Rosa doesn't care, continuing to meet Chancey in secret and dreaming that the two of them could run away together. When she finally realizes that Chancey never will, she kills herself.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Portius gets good and drunk after he's denied appointment as a judge, passed over for Zephon Brown, a man Portius thoroughly dislikes.
- Home-Early Surprise: Sayward's son Guerdon marries Effie, a faithless wife who has a habit of entertaining men at home. After Guerdon comes home to find another man in bed with his wife, he kills the man and takes off, never to be seen again. Many years later Sayward learns that he was killed in the war with Mexico.
- Intro Dump: For anyone who didn't read the first two installments or needed catching up, Sayward calls down her children for breakfast on the third page of the novel, introducing the reader to all nine surviving Wheeler kids.
- It Will Never Catch On: The folks who built the canal regard the railroad as "a crack-brained swindle" that will surely be a financial failure.
- I Was Quite a Looker: The first scene of the novel has Sayward dealing with the fact that she's just hit menopause. She contemplates with frustration how "her breasts, that used to be stout as wood ducks, hang down now like old shook-out meal bags."
- Jerkass: Chancey grows up into a selfish, spoiled young man who mocks and scorns his mother for believing in hard work as an end in itself. He's also something of a male Soapbox Sadie who prattles on endlessly about his belief in something that sounds a lot like communism (he likes to talk about Real Life early socialist Robert Owen). He's content to spend his life writing for a niche newspaper that never shows a profit and depends on benefactors. And politically, he's a Copperhead, a Northerner who is sympathetic to Southern slaveholders. (His mother by contrast lets runaway slaves hide in her house.)
- Mountain Man: Sayward's father Worth Luckett, who abandoned the family 35 years ago after little Sulie disappears, shows up on her doorstep out of nowhere. He's spent the whole time since he left hunting and trapping out West, and is appalled to see the frontier settlement of Moonshine Gulch getting civilized and urbanized as Americus.
- Mysterious Benefactor: Towards the end, Chancey operates his own newspaper, an anti-abolitionist Copperhead mouthpiece that doesn't make any money and is dependent on an unknown patron for support. Chancey is humiliated to discover (at the very end of the book) that his mother, whom he has scorned for years as an ignorant backwoods redneck, is the person who's been bankrolling his paper.
- Noodle Incident: The reasons why Portius Wheeler left Boston for the frontier, something that has been a mystery since the first novel, are never explained. Even when Portius's city girl sister shows up for a visit, Sayward can't bring herself to ask.
- Please Select New City Name: The good folks of Moonshine Gulch are battling with another nearby town over which will be the county seat. They decide that "Moonshine Gulch" is just too hick a name for a town with big ambitions, so they change it to "Americus."
- Shout-Out: Portius the intellectual observes that the mist is "dissolving into air—into thin air," and then launches into the "Our revels now have ended" soliloquy from The Tempest.
- The Shut-In: Rosa's mother, Mrs. Tench, who apparently had a mental breakdown of some sort after she was hurriedly married to Jake Tench after Portius knocked her up. Now Mrs. Tench never leaves the home or washes herself or combs her hair, but she's still filled with venom towards the Wheelers.
- Surprise Incest: It was apparently an open secret for much of the town, but no one told Chancey and his girlfriend, Rosa Tench, that they are half-siblings, Rosa being Portius's love child. They are shocked when they find out.
- Switching P.O.V.: Most of the book switches POV back and forth between Sayward and Chancey, but there are also interludes with Rosa Tench, Chancey's secret and illegitimate half-sister.
- You No Take Candle: Done repeatedly when the white folks of Americus find themselves talking with Indians. Played for tragedy when Sayward meets her sister Sulie, missing for decades, and discovers that she's a fully assimilated Lenape speaking in pidgin English.
