We’ve all seen one: a sprawling subdivision lined with McMansions, each eerily similar to the next and outfitted with the perfectly manicured lawn and neutral paint job that the neighborhood association requires.
In “Next Stop, Reloville,” Peter T. Kilborn examines these communities, often inhabited by “relos,” his name for affluent, midlevel executives who frequently relocate themselves and their families for the chance to climb the corporate ladder. Kilborn estimates that there are 10 million such people in the United States.
Kilborn shows how the “relo” way of life negatively affects their communities. Because “relos” don’t plan to stay long, they are less inclined to get involved in charitable or civic causes.
But their influence on real estate is profound: They drive up home prices because they can’t be bothered with bargaining, and their employers usually kick in money for the move. As they trek from state to state or even country to country, Kilborn writes, “they create an insular, portable, and parallel culture with little-recognized but real implications for American society at large.”
Kilborn focuses on a few specific families, including one set of parents who missed their daughter’s senior year of high school when she stayed behind to finish with her friends after they moved out of state. He interviews many women who yearn for a female best friend, which they struggle to find when uprooted every two or three years.
Kilborn writes, “Relos don’t have accents. Wherever they go, they don’t belong. Their kids don’t know where they are from. Relos don’t know where their funerals will be or who might come.” For these modern-day nomads, their lifestyle takes an extraordinary emotional toll.
It doesn’t much matter what I say about “Black Hills, the new Nora Roberts novel; most of the adult female population of the planet is going to read it anyway. It’s a staggering understatement to say that Roberts is review- proof.
There are more than 300 million copies of her books in print, and she’s written 160 best sellers, 39 of which have debuted at No. 1.
Still: “Black Hills” is synthetic mind candy. It’s not even very satisfying synthetic mind candy, like, for instance, Clive Cussler in his prime or Patricia Wentworth’s soothing Maud Silver mysteries.
Roberts could probably do better than a novel that, chapter by chapter, feeds her readers the top 100 female fantasies: (1) a rock-’em/sock-’em romantic partner who also takes out the garbage the minute he’s asked; (2) a French lover; (3) lustrous hair that keeps its shape even when a serial killer is looking to scalp its owner; (4) a rollicking shopping spree with the girls, followed by a spa day the following week; (5) a fierce wild animal (in this case, a cougar) that, inexplicably, forms a loving bond with the heroine. Need I continue?
In addition to cougars, there are horses, a tiger, hapless hikers and a serial killer on the loose in this latest bodice-ripper. Because that’s essentially what Roberts writes: romances with a soft patina of suspense.
This latest smooch-and-shoot saga spans three decades and many twists of the heart.
To give Roberts her due, she keeps this fluff aloft for hundreds of pages (partly by repeating the same sex scene every other chapter or so).
“Black Hills” isn’t much of a suspense story, and the romance is so silly that it isn’t even good fantasy fodder, but none of Roberts’ fans will give a hoot. For beyond any of the fantasies her individual novels heat up and serve, it’s the tale of Roberts herself — her transformation from an average mom to a Dickensian lean-and-mean writing machine who maintains her down-to-earth, saucy persona in the face of stupendous success — that offers the most satisfying fantasy of all.
That’s a tale that Roberts’ fans, as well as her critics, can agree to applaud.
