New England Playlist

Thanksgiving break, what to watch, read, listen to understand my native turf

New England doesn’t lean into its identity the way the South or the West does, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have one. It’s just that we’re the part of the country best known for reticence and self-effacement. The farther north you get, the less people say. So in place of a long-winded diatribe about the greatness of our six states, on the occasion of the holiday born to honor the region’s history—or, if you like, mythology, I offer you this Top Eight List of what to read, watch, and listen to to get in the New England spirit:

1. Beautiful Girls, the great 1996 movie, is set in a fictional Massachusetts town, and it captures what I take to be the quintessential New England spirit: going home for the holidays and reconnecting with old friends. Why is this a New England experience? Because so many of us move away. You couldn’t make this movie about Miami, because people who grow up there stay, all the better to keep hot-tubbing with childhood friends. In the deep north, we reconnect over Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. For a taste, here is one of the great monologues from the movie:

2. “Stick Season,” by Noah Kahane. I don’t think he has ever copped to being inspired by the movie Beautiful Girls, but Kahane, bard of Vermont, basically put the movie’s mojo into an insanely catchy song (here him describe its genesis on the great podcast Song Exploder). Video here:

3. Fountains of Wayne, “Valley Winter Song.” It’s a great thing Noah Kahane came along, because New England lost its great troubadour when Fountains of Wayne front-man Adam Schlesinger died of Covid-19, one of the pandemic’s early, young victims. Many of his band’s songs were set along the Mass Pike. Here is one of my favorites, from 2003:

If you didn’t catch that chorus, well, it’s one of the loveliest ever. He sings:

And the snow is coming down
On our New England town
And it's been falling all day long
What else is new
What could I do
I wrote a valley winter song
To play for you.

4. Jonathan Tropper, The Book of Joe. Tropper, who may be my favorite novelist—and who has given up writing novels, it seems, to be a show-runner for shows I don’t much care for—sets his books in the Northeast. He is from Westchester County, outside New York City, and that seems to be the setting of his best-known novel, This Is Where I Leave You, subject of the fine movie with Tina Fey and Jason Bateman. But his best book, for my money, is 2003’s The Book of Joe, which is about—you guessed it—a grown man returning to his home town, where he experiences Big Complicated Feelings. (Returning to my home town with Big Complicated Feelings pretty much sums up my existence.) The town is the fictional Bush Falls, Conn., which, based on coordinates given in the book, may be something like Windsor, Conn., where I went to high school. In this book, the protagonist, who wrote a best-selling novel filled with thinly veiled, insulting portraits of people he grew up with, goes home to see his ailing dad, and is forced to reconnect with his estranged brother, his estranged high school girlfriend, the basketball coach he loathed, and the best friend he lost track of. All with lots of foliage in the background. It’s insane that this hasn’t been adapted into a movie.

   

5. “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfucker,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.