Anything Is Possible

These chapters introduce three characters with roots in Amgash, Illinois. Tommy, Patty, and Linda have different relationships with this town and with the background influence of Lucy Barton, the successful hometown author.

Tommy is distinct among the first three central characters of the book for his religious faith, his belief in his community, and his symbolic past. He inherited his family’s farm, but it burns to the ground. In literature, fire often symbolizes rebirth. Tommy’s rebirth comes in the form of faith in God. Watching one’s home and land burn away can be traumatic, yet Tommy believes that God visited him during the fire. This comforts Tommy and provides a lightness that unburdens him from the financial and emotional toll of losing the farm. Tommy’s life after the fire is humbler; he works as a janitor for the local school system but doesn’t begrudge his lower pay or smaller house. Tommy’s faith and his peace with his life motivates him to be a good neighbor. In his eighties, he knows many people in the town and their family history. When Pete tells him that his father was responsible for the fire that destroyed Tommy’s farm, Tommy advocates for Pete’s father and refuses to acknowledge the possibility that someone he employed and cared for would do such a thing. Furthermore, Tommy decides that even if a neighbor had purposefully burned down his family farm, people are ultimately complicated and good at their core.

Tommy represents the power of community, communal spirit, and faith in self and others. In placing his faith and trust in the community, he also places faith and trust in his own capacities for forgiveness, duty, responsibility, and stable happiness. For Tommy, Amgash is a place of stability, neighborly understanding, and compassion. However, Amgash isn’t the same symbol of compassion for all the characters in the book. Tommy’s relationship with the town and its people juxtaposes Patty’s relationship with them, which is fraught with judgment.

Patty’s shame begins in her home. When her mother leaves her father for a local teacher who, in turn, leaves her, Patty witnesses her father’s breakdown. The breakup of her once-stable family permanently ruins Patty’s sense of safety. The gossip and judgment that the town engages in around her failing family unit haunts Patty well into her adulthood. As an adult, Patty stays in Amgash and works in the high school. Her father has passed, and her sister has moved away, leaving Patty with the responsibility of caring for her ailing and difficult mother, for whom Patty and her sister have harbored resentment. Patty has been caught up in the dramas and past shames of Amgash for years. Her own quest for love only exacerbates the abandonment of her mother. Patty’s husband leaves her as swiftly and painfully as her mother left decades before. Patty is the only one left to pick up the pieces of her broken family and deferred dreams of her own family. Patty’s source of comfort, unlike Tommy, isn’t the town community. Rather, Patty finds relief in Lucy Barton’s memoir of her time in Amgash. Lucy, a successful novelist from Amgash, is a woman whose family was one of the town’s poorest and most unstable families. However, Lucy symbolizes the dream of escape; she moved to New York and transformed her life. Because Lucy has the distance of time and space between her and Amgash, she brings cultural commentary and historical analysis to her memoir. Through Lucy’s point of view, Patty discovers the transformative power of turning away from the past to better understand her worth. Because Patty never left Amgash and never discovered the faith in community that informs Tommy’s role as a good Samaritan and neighbor, she’s stuck in a cycle of shame. Lucy’s memoir shows Patty how to rid herself of this shame, even if she can’t move away. Lucy thus becomes not just an analyzer and recorder but a guide.

Patty’s sister, Linda, considers herself divorced from her Amgash family, but she also repeats the cycle of low self-esteem, likely brought on by the trauma of her past in Amgash. Linda doesn’t help Patty care for their mother and lives away from Amgash in a wealthy home with her husband. Linda’s relationship with her daughter parallels her relationship with her mother: Linda doesn’t speak to her mother because of past emotional injuries, and Linda’s daughter avoids her family for the same reason. Linda’s husband abuses other women, but Linda seems resigned to the reality of their relationship and his flaws. Although Linda left Amgash, she didn’t leave behind the cycle of low self-worth and trauma. Linda left Amgash and her family’s reputation only to help create an even worse reputation for her new family just outside of Chicago.

Strout uses two juxtaposing environments to characterize the influence of town on townsperson. The rural romanticism of Tommy’s Amgash, in which the beauty of the farmland emphasizes the compassion of the people, contrasts with the same conflict and trauma of Patty’s Amgash. Then, the narrative compares Amgash with the veneer of the fancy town in which Linda now lives. Horrific crimes occur in Linda’s wealthy suburb, highlighting that what looks good on the outside isn’t necessarily good on the inside. These environments heavily influence how the characters see themselves and others in their community. Linda leans into the inauthenticity of her sophisticated and influential town, while Tommy embraces the communal spirit of his smaller and less affluent town. Patty falls somewhere in the middle, foreshadowing that one can strive to come to terms with the hometown that influenced their upbringing.