Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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."

When she was in her early 60's author Barbara Holland moved from Philadelphia to Loudon County in Northern Virginia, to a small house in the Blue Ridge Mountains some 60 miles outside of Washington D.C. It might as well have been a different planet. In Bingo Night at the Fire Hall Holland describes the world she came almost by accident to inhabit, a place somehow "unreachably far beyond the headlines and the evening news." Her house on the mountain overlooks a fertile valley in which the same families have farmed for generations. As she describes it, the people there live (or lived, at least, in the 1990s, when she was writing this book) in a sort of time capsule, a Mayberry-like idyll of 4-H clubs and church picnics. It's a place where nobody locks their doors (locking them would seem unneighborly), where people are defined not by their resumés but by their family ties.

Holland approaches her subject from a number of different angles, with chapters on the area's extensive role in the Civil War, for example, and on the weather and wildlife:

"I was pleased and excited to have a bear, until I followed the tracks to the lower porch and considered the remains of the trash bags. Among the strewn litter of crushed cans and coffee grounds the bear, like a psychotic burglar, had defecated copiously."

But what makes the book stand out is her description of the ethos of this place, where families' lives are intertwined over generations and where one is surrounded by one's family:

"On any given day a person in the supermarket could come across his or her entire extended family, one by one, aisle by aisle, pausing to exchange fragments of news among the canned goods. This would horrify city folk, whose relatives tend to get on their nerves, but we're a low-strung lot around here and our satisfaction with our birthplace spreads to include our kin -- or perhaps we consider them one and the same."

It would horrify me, certainly. But Holland writes about this way of life so well that one not only understands it, one almost pines for it:

"Relatives are more useful here than in the city or suburb. They have tools you can borrow. They're someone to call, in a taxiless world, when you need a ride. Someone to leave the kids with or go hunting with; someone to help get your firewood in or your boat painted. Someone to carry your coffin. From cradle to grave, my neighbors here swing in a hammock of family ties and nobody leaves except for the churchyard. Even the few who fled to Florida get carried home in the end."

The book makes clear how much modern lifestyles differ from the way of life that was natural to so many generations before us: small communities of neighbors living off the land, interdependent, clustered around a handful of public buildings--the bank and post office and general store. Nowadays, Holland writes, people don't need towns. They need highways between their work places and their living spaces, with places to shop in between.

At the same time that Holland is celebrating life in her valley, however, she is also recording its demise. The land that fed armies on both sides during the Civil War is yielding--increasingly, inexorably--to strip malls and housing projects. The fertility of the soil doesn't matter if you're only interested in paving it over. One can see through Holland's eyes how this influx of rootless Others is an affront to the land.

Holland, of course, is herself an immigrant, but unlike the housing developers who are carving the valley into subdivisions, she did not efface her surroundings; she adapted to them. Being an outsider also made her a keen observer of the world around her, which we can only be thankful for. I enjoyed Holland's book enormously. It is charmingly written and wise. I'll be seeking out more from her.

-- Debra Hamel

During the 1700s and 1800s, as the burgeoning population of the White Man, backed by his relatively sophisticated farming methods and industrial capacity, slowly encroached upon and suffocated the Native American cultures, there must have been those writers who bemoaned the passing of the Noble Savage and his way of life. Here, in BINGO NIGHT AT THE FIRE HALL, Barbara Holland, at the interface of vanishing rural, small-farm America and metastasizing, mall-happy suburbia, performs the same function.

The place is northern Virginia, less than an hour's drive west of Dulles International. Barbara places herself in a mountain cabin inherited from her mother near the village of Pikestown, a short distance from North Hill, at a gap in the Appalachians. After determined inspection of a Rand McNally, I can state with some degree of certainty that these are fictional place names. I suspect her point of view to emanate from somewhere in the Front Royal-Chester Gap-Sperryville arc. The time is the mid-1990s, and Holland herself is perhaps in her 60s.

Those readers who enjoyed Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences and Wasn't the Grass Greener?: Thirty-three Reasons Why Life Isn't as Good as It Used to Be are acquainted with the author's style, which is similar to that of the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney, but without the mean streak. But while the other two volumes deal with specifics, BINGO NIGHT AT THE FIRE HALL concerns itself with a way of life, a more nebulous concept, that otherwise gets lost in the mundane details of everyday living. This life, represented by family farms, local general stores, town meetings, bingo nights, a deeply felt Civil War heritage, local fund-raisers, school Christmas pageants, clean-cut and drug-free adolescents, and an environment where everyone knows everybody else, is giving way to the impersonal, stressed-out, multicultural, politically correct, acquisitive, self-centered and insidiously spreading suburbia created by the maturing post-war Baby Boomers and their spawn. And Barbara, a former big city dweller herself, observes this transition creeping over the ridgeline into her own back yard, and hints at a loss of deeper, traditional values.

This book is unlikely to appeal to the young or middle aged, but to those older who are simply getting old and marginalized. This fact doesn't invalidate Barbara's observations, but rather makes them irrelevant to the newest generations, who will, in time, have their own turn at disenchantment.

Barbara Holland writes about her experiences in moving out to "rural" Loudoun County and about the effect of the encroaching development on the country lifestyle.

I grew up and worked on a farm in western Loudoun. As one of the "locals", I enjoyed her account of the old way of life and it was fun to read about places and people I knew--it brought back a lot of memories. I also enjoyed (and shared) her obvious distaste for the suburbanites who have invaded and taken over Loudoun. That being said, I found her book overly simplistic and highly embellished.Despite her apparent love for the "locals", she understands them only on the most rudimentary level, which is why her analyses are often simplistic.

Readers should be aware that the book is half fiction and half fact. The "Mountain" where she lives is not nearly as inaccessible and remote as she portrays it. Her towns of "Pikesville" and "North Hill" are actually literary conglomerations of several real towns. In addition, Ms. Holland moved to Loudoun in the 1990's. By that point, the County had already been under transition from rural country to suburban life for almost 10 years. Many of the old-timers and old families had long since moved on or passed away. Which is perhaps why she felt the need to embellish the story. However, it was still fun to read about my High School and to recognize the few people and families that she names. All in all it was an enjoyable read. Potential readers should just be aware that it is a work of fiction, with its setting in reality.

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.

I am not much of a reader. As usual I was fumbling through the book store on one of those boring family vacations and fell into this book. I could not seem to put it down. This book was very well written and I plan to read all of Barbara Hollands books she is a very creative writer and I would recommend any of her books ( even though I have only read this one ) to anyone.

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 would highly recommend this book to people who, like me, are leaving a large Northern city for a small Southern town. I started reading this book shortly after the move, and I found myself saying, "Heck yes!" to a lot of what Holland said.

People in small towns ARE more suspicious of outsiders, but at the same time, they are more willing to help when it is needed. If you are a single woman, you have to accept being treated differently without being offended.

People in small towns are less materialistic. I looked around my new town and despaired at the lack of "interesting" shopping. That night, I read the part in Holland's book where she talked about how small-town men reject the idea of being on a salary (and thus, having to go to work every day - even on good fishing days or the first day of deer season). As a result, people only spend money on things they absolutely NEED.

There are a lot of things about the culture of small-town southern America that are eye-opening and make you think differently than maybe you did. Another example: Holland suggests that the abandoned junked cars left in front yards of houses are not there out of "slovenry", but because the car was such a valued tool and even companion during its life, that its owner could not bear to junk it, and instead put it "out to pasture" as one might a superannuated horse.

This is a good, cheering, fortifying book for people who have moved to what seems to them an alien culture. It makes you realize that people have their reasons for doing things, even if the things they do seem weird to you.

There is also a eulogistic tone to this book: Holland documents the encroachment of "eastern suburbs" on the small town and how the transplanted city-folk mostly complain about the aspects of rural life (the noise made by corn-driers, the dogs running loose) that Holland has come to accept and love. She expresses concern for the changes in the area that she lives in (and I would guess, has come to love): the rising crime, the increase in traffic, the insistence of the transplanted Washingtonians to remake the area into their own image, the loss of farmland.

If there is one major lesson from this book, it is that you should try to understand and appreciate the culture and customs of the place where you live, and not moan because there is no Starbucks and the nearest bookstore is an hour's drive. She makes her case convincingly and I at least felt humbled because I had complained about the "way things weren't" in my new home. I will try harder to appreciate the area for what it is and see its good qualities in the future

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!