Save the Village, Michele Herman’s novel, is a love letter to Greenwich Village and those who live there. Her descriptions of both place and mood are so visceral that one swears she’s actually walking along the cobblestone, admiring the red brick buildings. We understand from the start that living in this part of Manhattan is a unique experience, the inhabitants are idiosyncratic devotees of this swath of New York City.
Becca Cammeyer, our protagonist, a seasoned, respected tour guide for her neighborhood, invites us into her life after a terrible tragedy takes place. Before that, Becca’s existence was narrow but knowable; she lived alone with her dog in a walk-up apartment and took pride in her work. Leading tourists around the Village gave her stability, while her ties to family and friends remained frayed and unhappy. Becca’s adult child is living abroad and she is not on speaking terms with her mother or her best friend. What ‘awakens’ her is a seismic event. This underscores how often in times of great sorrow or great joy we reassess ourselves.
Michele Herman skillfully lures us into Becca’s sphere — her longings, regrets and her resistance to what is meaningful. She wisely writes the character, we feel Becca’s pain deeply. And that poses a meaningful question for the reader, as the years churn forward, how can it be that we are stuck, having inexplicably lost our way?
Since we root for Becca against the odds, I highly recommend you grab a copy to see where she lands. Here is a read that truly spoke to me.
Q&A WITH MICHELE HERMAN
Q: Greenwich Village is a character in your novel. How did you decide on this story?
A: Once I knew I was going to attempt a novel, I knew it would be a Greenwich Village novel. I felt blessed to be able to move to the far West Village with my husband in 1985, and have tried to be a good Village citizen ever since. I started studying fiction seriously (in the Village) at around the same time I became a Villager, so I often wrote about Villagers; it’s hard to pull apart these two strands of my life.
Q: Becca is almost a historian. Did you research the Village to write this book?
A: As a new Villager, I scarfed down all the New York City history and architecture books I could find. Years ago, I conducted a couple of walking tours for one of the preservation organizations I belonged to. I’ve long been a reporter and columnist for The Villager and The Village Sun. In other words, I had a good knowledge base to draw on. I did some additional research on specific topics as needed (explosives, the Washington Square Hotel, the pony man of Washington Street). But mostly I drew on my own Village life, which at one time involved a lot of playdates, in everything from tiny tenement apartments like Becca’s to single-family townhouses like Melora’s.
Q: The writing is detailed and lively. I know you’ve published a few books of poetry. How different did you find writing a novel?
A: Thank you, Susan. I’ve always been a prose writer, first of magazine articles, then essays and short stories. My MFA is in nonfiction. The poetry started only seven years ago. This is odd, because if left to my own devices I tend to futz with small, detailed things until I get them just right – you’d think I would have landed on poetry a lot sooner. Either I got lucky, or the poetry unlocked material and emotion I couldn’t quite get at in prose, or all my years of studying the narrative craft informed my poems, but I had a lot of quick, completely unexpected success with poetry.
The novel, on the other hand – oh, the novel. It glared at me and taunted me and grew flabby on me. I lived through years of praying for the delirium of a big chunk of busy work that absolutely had to preempt the novel. Eventually I got over myself and just did the work, getting a lot of things wrong on the long road to getting them right, learning to still the unhelpful voices so that my imagination could show me the way.
Q: The mother/daughter bond is complicated at any age and stage. Can you describe how “stuck” Becca is when it comes to her mother?
A: Oh, she’s mighty stuck. She’s still carrying around her ancient adolescent scorn of her mother coupled with her Villager’s reflexive scorn of the suburbs. She’s also still idealizing her father, because he was more lovable and he died before she was old enough to discern his weaknesses. All her years of avoiding her mother hardens the scorn; she doesn’t have to entertain the possibility that her mother may have a valid viewpoint. I had to all but push Becca onto that Metro-North train.
Q: No spoilers here, but why did Becca and Melora have such a falling out?
A: In a word, gentrification (a useful Latinate neologism). As Becca sees it, Melora and her husband earned some real money and went over to the dark side. As Melora sees it, Becca has her ass stuck in a past that’s never coming back and wasn’t so great in the first place.
Q: How would you describe the heart of this novel?
A: Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said it in 1776: We must hang together or surely we shall hang separately. Reconciliation. Opening of minds to new possibilities.
Q: The title is perfect! Did you have it in mind all along? And let’s talk about the symbolism.
A: Save the Village was always the title. My emergency back-up title, Not in Becca’s Backyard, ran a distant second. Save the Village was the name of a grass-roots preservation group my husband and I became very active in when we moved to the Village, an organization where we made many friends and got a solid education in zoning and community boards and organizing. The name already had a good pedigree: it was the name sometimes given to urbanist Jane Jacobs’ Committee to Save the West Village. We were very much carrying on the good work that she did. The other, broader meaning of the word “village” sealed the deal, because this is very much a novel about the kind of village it takes, the kind Becca needs desperately to rebuild for herself.
Q: What writers do you like to read and do you have a new book in the works?
A: If there’s a category of authors I’m most attracted to, I’d say it’s authors whose sentences have verve, who eschew stereotypes, and who have a sense of humor (gallows is fine) coupled with an ultimately humane outlook on life. Often they’re female. I’ve recently fallen in love with books by Cecile Barlier, Laurie Frankel, Claire Keegan. Some of my pillars: Elizabeth Bishop, Annie Dillard, Jamaica Kincaid, Bernard Malamud, William Maxwell, Grace Paley, Jose Saramago, Wislawa Symborska, Miriam Toews, Virginia Woolf. In recent years I’ve added memoirs to my steady diet of fiction, because I teach two memoir classes at The Writers Studio and use short excerpts from published books as teaching tools. Some favorite memoir writers so far: Elizabeth Alexander, Eula Biss, James Brown (not that one), Anatole Broyard, Alexandra Fuller, Debra Gwartney, Gabrielle Hamilton, George Hodgman, Saeed Jones, Kristin Kimball, Maxine Hong Kingston, Hilary Mantel, Maggie O’Farrell.
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About Michele Herman:
Michele Herman’s novel Save the Village (Regal House Publishing) is coming out in February 2022, at around the same time as her second chapbook of poems, Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes (Finishing Line Press). She is also author of the chapbook Victory Boulevard (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her stories, poems, essays and articles have appeared in dozens of publications including Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The New York Times, The Hudson Review, The Sun and Diagram. She’s a veteran teacher of fiction, poetry and memoir at The Writers Studio, and as a developmental editor and private writing coach has helped many writers bring their manuscripts to fruition. She is proud to be named in the acknowledgements page of many published books. She is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, won the 2018 New York Press Association prize for Best Column, and is a two-time winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for her new versions of Jacques Brel songs. Her columns have appeared for years in both The Villager and The Village Sun, and she often performs her own prose and poetry in cabaret and theatrical settings around New York City. She is the mother of two grown sons, and lives with her husband in Greenwich Village.
