The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

There are a lot of reasons to like this book. Michael Hofmann, reviewing it in the LRB, liked it so much he had to use two foreign terms to label it. "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is vast fun and a vast life," he writes, "a Kulturgeschichte and a roman à thèse."

Edwards's book convinced me of something I'd never truly believed in the past: that it is possible to lead a full, complex life without leaving home. Ebenezer Le Page leaves Guernsey only once in his long life, for a day trip to neighboring Jersey; and he only reads one book, Robinson Crusoe. Yet his life, as Hofmann writes, is vast.

Of course, I'd encountered this idea before, but I didn't buy it--not from historians, and certainly not from anthropologists. Spending one's life in a single place, I thought, was a curse (think of Bodie in The Wire, who doesn't realize that the radio stations are different outside of Baltimore).

In part, this was why I had trouble getting used to Philadelphia, a sedentary city where even rich people stay in the same neighborhood for generations, and where newcomers are regarded with distrust, like the Englishmen in Le Page's Guernsey. The book of my own life will still be a Bildungsroman, not a Kulturgeschichte, but at least I understand Philly a little better than I used to.