In recent months, job stress has had me increasingly
fantasizing about buying livestock and going back to the land. So I
greeted Michael Perry’s new book, Coop, with
enthusiasm—subtitled “a year of poultry, pigs, and parenting,” I
expected Perry to muse on localism with a Minnesota twist.
Instead, I was confronted with irritating digressions into Perry’s
obscure fundamentalist upbringing in a Protestant sect, whole
nauseating chapters about the selection of a birthing pool for his
pregnant wife, and later, some depressing reflections on the death of
his brother’s kid.
I understand why Perry’s publishers packaged the book for a gullible
audience of liberals concerned with where their food comes from. But
instead of keep-it-light anecdotes about building a chicken coop or
naming the sheep, Perry subjects us at one point to a meeting between
his wife and her evangelist nutritionist. I was far more interested in
why Perry thought it a good idea to subject his unborn child to the
risks of self-sufficiency, but found very little in the way of
self-exploration to nourish me until the book’s conclusion.
Perry frequently mentions having to hit “the road” at the end of his
chapters, but never explains how being a contributing editor at
Men’s Health might mean that his year in the country wasn’t such
a big risk after all—an indulgence in vanity showing lack of
imagination, perhaps, and living it vicariously was no fun at all.