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For the nine essays of The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth paint as unidealized a portrait of a small town as we are likely to see anytime soon. "This is not the sort of place where you would desire to live," Holm writes of Minneota in his introductory essay, and indeed during the 1950s census takers seem simply to have lost track of the town and its 1,000-plus inhabitants, most of them aging descendants of Icelandic immigrants. Two of the best of these essays have as their subjects failure and poverty. And in the most beautiful of these, "The Music of Failure: Variations on an Idea," Holm starts by admitting "At fifteen, I could define failure fast: to die in Minneota, Minnesota"; detours into a long, edgy, heartfelt appreciation of Pauline Bardal, "a poor, presumably ignorant and obscure woman" in whose back room he first heard a piano played; assails "a cheap destructive idea of success"; ruminates on the lessons of the Gilgamesh epic; and concludes that "whatever failure is, Minneota is not it."
In a way, the other essays in the book -- a meditation on a high school scandal in the 1950s, a wonderful depiction of watching old home movies at a family reunion, a good-humored look at the variations in community recipes for brown bread and Vinarterta, to name three -- simply buttress Holm's conclusion. Of course, like all good essayists, Holm makes his points by indirection. He is by turns cantankerous, sensible, and lyrical. He stops us short with fine observations. Watching old family movies, for example, he sees the pleasure his parents take in one another and feels momentary guilt for having come along to interrupt that pleasure, then decides "We take too much credit for our effect on the world, whining about our misery and guilt, what others have done or not done to us. The world runs its normal course like the river of Heraclitus -- new water passing by on its way to the sea. Still water is dead water. We are all here where we are to thicken the plot, as the Zen monks say."
Most of all Holm traces the web of personal and family histories, the ups and downs of community life -- the connections -- that make Minneota, Minnesota, what it is.
And that, of course, is the point. "Without connection is no community, without community is no civilization. Without connections is no love, no order, no real freedom to be alive as we ought." Sadly such human connections cannot be bought, sold, or consumed; they stand outside the marketplace, which we moderns so worshipfully seek on bended knee. No, as Holm amply and eloquently demonstrates here, human connections can only be made over time-with commitment, persistence, trust, respect, and goodwill. That, I'm afraid, is the not-so-secret secret of building community.
Alden Mudge is a freelance writer in Oakland, California.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.