No escape, even in Utopia, from national issues

Those of us in Middle America are always grateful when reporters from a big-circulation magazine or network TV station decide to pay us a call. Their journalistic quest invariably boils down to one question: What is life like between the Hudson River and Los Angeles? The media focus is kind of sweet if you ignore the patronizing tone and the absolute cluelessness of the effort. Look, a vegetable garden! Picnics! Potlucks! Bingo!

Entertainment Weekly magazine sent intrepid reporter Karen Valby into the great flyover zone in 2006 in search of a "small town somewhere in America without popular culture." She found Utopia, a town of a few hundred souls 90 miles west of the nation's seventh-largest city, San Antonio. Utopia is not exactly off the grid, and one suspects that its name appealed to Valby more than its isolation.

Her book, "Welcome to Utopia: Notes From a Small Town," is a pleasant moment-in-time postcard of a typical U.S. town. Valby touches most of the familiar and tired icons of small-town living, including the cafe and its jelly-stained tabletops, the general store and its all-male klatch of loafing coffee gossips, and the usual disenfranchised body-modified youth, which Utopia and the nation seem to churn out with regularity. Over a two-year period, Valby found (surprise!) that Utopia is also dealing with such current national issues as race, the economy and war.

Change has come to Utopia (and just about everywhere else) in the form of satellite, cell and broadband, and the sudden popularity of Barack Obama, who was running for president at the time. On that last item, the idea of an African-American in the White House (following a Texan) certainly stirred up the coffee drinkers. They attempted to parse the N word for Valby and it becomes an uncomfortable conversation.

The most poignant scenes concern Kathy and Randy Wiekamp, proud parents of three sons serving overseas in the Army. When their oldest, Jeff, dies in Afghanistan, Kathy is awakened at 2 a.m. with the news. Her sorrow and rage are universal. She asks the military detail, "OK ... tell me one reason why you had to ruin my life at two-thirty in the morning? My life is over, so why couldn't you have at least waited until the sun came up?"

One of the problems with the book is the presence of Valby herself. Although the writing is not overly first-person, there is enough of her to be distracting. One wonders if the conversation at the general store is genuine, or are the citizens of Utopia savvy enough to know that when the lights go on they are expected to put on a show?

In the end, the full effect of "Welcome to Utopia" can work only in comparison with somewhere else -- let's say Manhattan (and not Manhattan, Kansas). Otherwise, the struggles of escaping the past and coming to terms with the present and the uncertain future are geographically neutral. Valby is a fine observer and the book is entertaining, but there is little in it that has not been covered previously.

Stephen J. Lyons' book on Cedar Rapids and the Midwest flooding in 2008, "The 1,000-Year Flood: Destruction, Loss, Rescue, and Redemption Along the Mississippi River," will be published this fall by Globe Pequot Press.