Book Review: Town and Gown
Town and Gown. Jan English Leary,
Fomite Press, 2022, $17.95, Paperback
Reviewed by Caroline L. Huftalen.
Jan English Leary’s latest novel, Town and Gown (Fomite Press, 2022), told from two perspectives, considers the influences and expectations we face as adolescents and how those same lingering outside voices shape the rest of our lives. Leary’s two differing main characters push against what is expected of them, careen through diversions along their independent paths, and somehow in the end find just what they needed and never knew they wanted.
Each chapter represents the opposite side of the high school hierarchy coin. On one side, there is Wanda, a farmer’s daughter in a small town where agriculture keeps residents on the bottom of the ranks. Her family’s only goal for her is marriage, and they’ve kept her on track to be wed after graduating from high school. On the other side is Callie, a popular girl dating a jock who comes from a family of older parents, one a professor who expects linear success. The book’s title comes from the old English term to reference the differing sides of a community, the town being the non-academic population and the gown being those in the university community. The simple difference of educational rank is enough to keep the cliques separate until circumstances pull them together to create an unbreakable, and unexpected, bond.
Leary’s novel depicts the choices we make for ourselves and those that are made for us and how those choices shape who we are and what happens in our lives.
Both Wanda and Callie face setbacks on their way to independence, but despite broken hearts, major disappointments, and a community not quite ready for them to break free, they both persevere and find hope even during the bleakest of times. Wanda and Callie continually fight against their families’ limitations of perspective both for their personal lives and for their greater community. Leary succeeds in portraying ignorance, tradition, and small town sensibilities without vilifying the older generation. Their barriers are created out of love, protection, and the hope for happy lives for their children; it is not clear until it’s too late that those same barriers are what caused such heartache. The role of women in this town is to make others happy, to put everyone else's needs ahead of their own, and to cater to men and children. This is a role that is familiar and rampant even in today’s society, small town or not. Leary’s characters take one small step, each time they get a chance, to fracture that mindset and societal role. These women were never asked or told to dream big; they come from a place of narrow thinking. Their small, simple acts of choosing a profession, an educational path, a man, a way to raise a child, and a religion are all giant leaps towards their liberated lives.
Wanda and Callie’s lives barely intersect, with brief encounters here and there. They mostly live in vastly different universes until Callie’s mother brings them together post-high school. At the culmination of all their efforts, in the final chapters of the novel, Callie and Wanda’s spheres collide. Leary takes two grown women, still harboring the troubles of their youth, and allows them to be the young girls they truly are at heart, questioning whether we all actually ever grow up. The women find common ground after Wanda shares a deep, dark secret, one she has never told to even her closest confidantes. Reminiscent of the drama being shared in locker rooms, bathroom stalls, and whispered in hallways, Wanda and Callie only come together when a flaw is revealed, each letting the other know that she isn’t alone in not being perfect, in still searching for her place in the world, and in finding acceptance in spaces, places, and people. Leary took what is usually a trivial sharing amongst young girls and turned it into the culminating moment when Callie and Wanda realize they have found the one person who will accept them for who they really are and not who someone else wanted them to be.
With their friendship feeling like it was meant to be, this left me wondering if in previous chapters there could have been more ships passing in the night encounters. Wanda has more memories of Callie, which rings true as she often obsesses over Callie’s ease in life, her self-esteem, and her place in the ranks. Callie’s memories mostly exist from their adulthood after Wanda has reentered her life by way of cleaning Callie’s mother’s house.
The journey of different points of view is worth reading the twists, the bad decisions, and the mishaps. Wanda and Callie both find a come as you are relationship after battling others’ wants and desires regarding who they should be and when. At the end, both Callie and Wanda find love that never asks them to change. It’s not in a man. It’s not in their family. It’s in each other. Leary’s novel in the end explores the power of female friendship.