Buckeye

“Bonhomie had been founded in a northwest pocket of Ohio in 1857 by a small group of merchants and their families, on land transformed by the last Ice Age, when a glacier nudged its way down from Canada and melted, creating not only Niagara Falls and the great lakes, but also a vast swamp across the top of Ohio and Indiana that took thirty years to drain and left behind soil densely ripe for farming.”

Setting is important in this novel, and Ryan takes as much time to introduce the town of Bonhomie as he does his main characters. Much of the novel is a portrait of the Midwest during WWII and the post-war period, a time of societal change and rapid modernization. Characters like Roman will come to embody the bigotry of an established population resentful of demographic changes, and the author will closely examine the way that midwestern identity grows and changes as society progresses.

“Roman looked a little disappointed and changed tracks. He asked if any of them had noticed the recent influx of refugees in town from central Europe, trickling in, he added.

Roman is characterized in part by his intolerance: He is a successful businessman who worries because the house he has purchased for Cal and Becky is “too close” to both a working-class neighborhood and one that is populated by African American and Mexican American families. Here, he expresses his discontent with a new wave of immigrants who, although white, are from what is to him a less desirable part of Europe. Roman’s prejudices reflect those of many others in town, and the narrative’s engagement with class is part of the novel’s broader examination of the sociocultural forces that shaped life in wartime America.