Where It All Goes Down
Boonville, NY, Early 1900s
Bert Breen's Barn is a regional novel. That means it has a very strong sense of place and that the place ties into the novel's events, as well as into how characters think and act.
Tom's story takes place in upstate New York, in and around the town of Boonville at the turn of the century, when people were still using wagons to get around, saying things like "vamoose," and clamoring for the hot new technology: landline telephones. While Tom works at a mill in town and several other scenes occur at stores, the bank, a lawyer's office, and a hotel, much of the story takes place in the countryside outside of town, where both the weather and the terrain can make life difficult for those who live there.
Boonville is teeny-tiny, with a population of around 3,300 when the novel is set. Plus, people in the area tended to be spread out because of the region's valleys, swamps, forests, hills, brooks, good farmland, and bad farmland. There's the sense that the sparse population, varied geography, and the sometimes challenging weather test people, bringing out both the inherent resourcefulness in humanity as well as the inherent crazy. More than once in the novel, Tom "[gets] to thinking how queer some folks could be" (49.8) while he's driving through the countryside.
Moreover, the setting gives the feeling that it's up to each individual to get by. There are no kindly environment fairies in Boonville that are going to rain down blissful weather, good crops, and healthy livestock—let alone the latest version of the iPhone. Whether walking through a snowstorm or trying to scrape together a living, it's not easy.
Still, even though the environment challenges Tom, he knows it's ridiculous to waste time and energy wishing bad conditions away. The bad weather is not the work of evil hobgoblins, nor is good weather the work of magical unicorns. Both are part of life, and the folks in the book have got to figure out how to live with it, no matter how much they wish there were unicorns. The isolated, dynamic, and sometimes challenging environment hammers that point home throughout the book.