Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village

It's hard for me, emeshed in the metropolitan area's urban sprawl, to believe that places like the one Barbara Holland writes about even exist, much less just sixty miles from downtown Washington, DC. She lives in a town with a country general store, where keeping a chainsaw is a necessity in order to remove felled trees from one's driveway, where backyards overlook mountains and orchards.Yet Holland does more than celebrate her small town in this book, a sparkling, lively account of her adjustment to small-town life in northern Virginia after years of big city living. She is also sounding an alarm, because, increasingly, the orchards are giving way to housing developments and the country stores to Wal-Marts. There is a sadness underneath Holland's light, subtle tone. Though she writes entertainingly about the hazards of life in a rural area (a mouse nest in her car's engine provides one typical example), she embraces its virtues with an unmistakable fondness. There is something to be said for a place where neighbors have known each other for generations, where community means lending a hand in a time of crisis, not arguing over properly mown grass and building anonymous gated fortresses. Let's hope that Holland's terrific tribute is not also an elegy.

I live in the county where Ms. Holland resides and this book contains a delightful description of our lifestyle and values here. Her view of life is delightful and will fill even the most modern minded soul with nostalgia for ways that are too quickly passing.

Barbara Holland is an outstanding writer who should be more famous than she is. Bingo Night is one of my favorite books. Her book One's Company is also superb. Holland can write; her wry wit is highly entertaining, and makes me wish we could be best friends. Bingo Night awesomely captures our changing American landscape/culture from a very personal perspective. It's a jewel!

In Bingo Night, Barbara Holland tells the story of how she came to love village life in western Loudoun County, Virginia. She reports precisely on events that take place there---a county fair, a fund-raising rummage sale, an election, winter in the mountains. Her prose style is as clear as fresh water. Perhaps because of her insider/outsider status as someone "come from away," Holland writes perceptively about the encroachment of the Washington, DC, suburbs on village life in western Loudoun County. Loudoun County is filling up with well-off suburbanites, for whom the small-town rural life is irrelevant. Some villagers have sold out and moved on, and more will follow. Yet the book is not grim. Rather, it is brimful with the pleasures of fine writing and a real feeling for the life she has chosen. You taste, touch, smell, see, and hear this life - quite specifically - as you read. And you feel worried, as she does, at the threats to its survival. I live across the Potomac River in Maryland, closer to Washington (about 25 miles) than Barbara Holland is (about 60 miles), and I can vouch for the honesty of her comments.

Those of us who live in once completely rural areas, or even those who are confirmed city dwellers with a sense of the need for clear boundaries between rural and urban will find a lot to think about while reading this book. From the edges of her rural community, Holland watches the passage of a way of life as developers buy up local farms and transform them presto chango into "countryside estates," houses which look, as Holland notes, like they're "dropped from the sky." What I especially liked about this book was the way it chronicles on a very personal level the regrets the author feels as this process takes place. It's a sort of quiet requiem for a way of life she has never fully participated in, but admires. From where I sit, across the Potomac River, watching the suburbs creep into Montgomery County's "agricultural preserve", her musings are painfully familiar. But they aren't bleak, which is this book's saving grace. When I finished the book I had a clear, almost intimate feel for the author sitting in her little house on the mountainside, "still there."