The Rise and Fall of the Republic of West Delphi

In West Delphi the border between the real and the imaginary is more permeable than elsewhere.An idiosyncratic mix of memoir, pseudo literary analysis, Chandleresque detective fiction, and an eschatological narrative by a honeybee (among other things), The Rise and Fall of the Republic of West Delphi chronicles a period in the late 1970s and early 80s when a group of people in a Vermont village became so inebriated at discovering sympathetic souls in such a splendid place that they formed their own 'republic'-complete with army and navy, press reports, passports, and parades. Until. . .it all fell apart.Counterpointed by interludes describing the author’s lifelong attachment to the land, Rise and Fall is inadvertently an allegory for Vermont’s sense of its own uniqueness (if Plato did not point to Vermont as the perfect state, it’s been suggested, it was only because in his day Vermont was not here to point to). West Delphi’s chronicle is threaded through with the question of why, in order to feel that we belong to a community (or state, or country), we must define someone else as not belonging. Though the place is particular and the story entertaining-in part a village drama along the lines of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series-its underlying subject is nationalism: how it springs up like mushrooms whenever the conditions are right. And how this impulse-as we learn from the elegiac tale told by a honeybee, 'The End of Freya’s Reign'- risks the destruction of the earth. At a time when Vermont has been figuring prominently in the national news (even Washington, DC is aware of us, sort of like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings abruptly focusing attention on the distant and bucolic Shire when it threatens his power) the story of this small place in this small state is a topical and urgent one.