Everyday Canvas

A Few Books and Their Settings

Prompt: Have you ever read a book and the setting was a town you lived by or a town or city you have been to? Was the author from the town near you?

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Yes, several, in fact. The oldest written one that I can recall was Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. You must know the story, so I am not getting into it here. Check this: Gatsby-mansion  
This mansion was on sale last year for 3.9 million. I am not sure of what happened to it or if it is sold at all.

Derailed by James Siegel happens on and around Long Island Railroad. This thriller is about a marriage that went bad and sinister because of the husband’s betrayal. I used to ride the trains on the very same railroad to NY City. James Siegel is from NY, but I am not sure if he is from Long Island.

That Night by Alice McDermott, which used to be one of my favorites, takes place in Levittown, LI, NY, featuring teenage love and resulting vandalism and chaos. It is a psychological-analysis type of a story written from an adult’s viewpoint looking back at those teen years. Alice McDermott is from LI.

Beach Road by James Patterson takes place in East Hampton and is told from seven different characters' perspectives in short chapters. A struggling lawyer working in the super-rich town of E. Hampton represents the young man on trial in a murder case, in which three people the lawyer knew is shot. James Patterson is from Northern NY, not from LI.

Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates takes place quite close to where I used to live and its railroad station was on my line about three stops toward Manhattan. It is about unhappy characters and romantic (infatuation, to be exact) kinds of connections after a chance happening. The story is written with a realistic tone, and it focuses on Cold Spring Harbor as if the town was one of the characters.

There are many other books that I read also had Long Island, NY as their settings. Of the places I visited outside of LI, I can think of John Updike’s Rabbit series, which is situated in Brewster, PA. Also, Couples by the same author that took place in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which the promiscuity and decadence in it had shocked me at the time that I read it. Those things do not shock me anymore.

There are also other books whose stories took place in London and a few other cities I visited in Europe and overseas, which I am not going to go into now because this entry is getting too long, and I am not even finished with the settings of the books in the USA.