‘Our Towns’ could use a little more heart

James Fallows and Deborah Fallows, the married authors of “Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America” (Pantheon, 413 pp., believe that America needs a book like theirs right now.

“Most parts of America have been doing better, in most ways, than most Americans imagine,” James Fallows argues in his half of the book’s introduction. “We wanted to take a fresh look at the country, its disappointments and its possibilities.”

The means by which Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and his wife, author of “A Mother’s Work” and “Dreaming in Chinese,” navigate our country’s course is by flying across America in their plane, a singleengine prop with a built-in parachute.

That parachute is never deployed during their book-length journey, but it is a good metaphor for their method. The pair drop down into 29 towns across the USA’s length and breadth, soft-landing at the local airport and fanning out to sample the local institutions, industries and attitudes.

That proves more enticing in theory as a vagabond literary conceit than it is in reality as a 400-plus-page revisiting of the towns the couple called on. The conversational tone of what is essentially the Fallowses’ travel diary is dulled by the drone of data-speak, fact- and statistic-laden. The couple mostly share municipal success story after success story. The good news is welcome. The bad news is a lack of dramatic tension. Any alternate narrative of dying towns still trying to rehabilitate themselves largely gets lost.

John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” is cited as a literary lodestone in “Our Towns,” along with William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways.” With the best intentions, however, “Our Towns” re-renders those American odysseys as something closer to a thoughtful think-tank study for the Pew Research Center — where, unsurprisingly perhaps, Deborah Fallows has worked.

There is a great deal of fascinating information leavened throughout “Our Towns.” The survival stories of every town visited by the Fallowses matter enormously. That the couple have collected them between covers is a noble achievement. Visiting those towns in person, with this book as a guide, now would be the best way to bring them to life.

Authors James and Deborah Fallows