Have been reading a novel called What to Keep because it is set in my hometown. Specifically, it is set not only in Columbus but in the very suburb I grew up in, at about the time I was growing up there.

Not much in the way of fiction or "bildungsromans" is set in Columbus. The best-known examples are James Thurber and Bob Greene. (A more recent example is an off-Broadway play, which Variety called "an unkind payback piece.") But all of them lived in Ohio well before my time--so for me, their memories might as well belong to another town, as well as another time.

What to Keep is reasonably attentive to detail and throws in enough recognizable references to keep an attentive native on her toes (Lazarus! Johnson's Ice Cream! The Dispatch!) And, nightmare-inducingly for me, we first meet the heroine when she is attending my junior high. But, according to this article, the author did not grow up in Columbus; she only visited there, and for that reason she never really captures what it felt like to grow up there, or what any of the people might have been like. The characters are sufficiently odd that they could come from anywhere.

The book really doesn't get cooking until its last third, by which time most of the characters have relocated to pre-9/11 New York. So I couldn't help wondering what it would take to write a book about a hometown from which people didn't have to escape to find a happy ending. (Since I left town almost 20 years ago, I guess I won't be writing it.) Clearly, not everyone has needed to escape--many people I know still live in Columbus. But none of them seem to be writing books about it.