The main booster of this putative theme park is the local banker Clive Peoples, Jr., perhaps the only purely unlikable character in this novel featuring smart-alecky, low-key characters.Ĭlive has a mother, eighty-year-old widow Beryl Peoples, a retired teacher who lives in one of North Bath's ancient houses, "aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont." Her house is located on North Main Street, which is lined by venerable elm trees that have so far escaped Dutch elm disease and which every winter release one or more limbs which crash into one of the ancient houses. Nevertheless, there is hope on the horizon in the form of a theme park called the Ultimate Escape that may be built near the town, breathing in some much-needed life.
Ronald Reagan is president but his "Morning in America" certainly has not dawned in North Bath. It seems that nothing good ever happens there. The town has been dying a slow death since then. Richard Russo's fictional North Bath is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, a town where luck ran out a hundred years before when the springs that made it a popular spa town dried up.
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