The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth: Minneota, Minnesota

Holm (Coming Home Crazy) is living once again in the small town of Minneota, Minn., where he grew up, and he is feeling sentimental about it. He is a smart writer and has some interesting things to say about sense of place, but there is an underlying softness in his attitude towards his hometown that makes these essays treacly, and no amount of literary references can sharpen them. ""God knows I tried to escape, to do the right American thing, making a middle-class life in a gentler, lovelier, more urbane place, some better home for an eccentric intellectual misfit,"" he insists in an essay that rambles from the cost of living in Minneota to the meaning of the town's name (""much water"" in Dakota) to reviewer misprints of the title of his first book, but one gets the feeling he never tried all that hard. The history of the town is much less interesting than the characters that populated it in Holm's childhood, and he devotes much of the book to biography of these characters, many of them originally from Iceland. An essay on the way that children are taught to mistrust strangers today segues into a tribute to the elderly woman who often baby-sat for him; an examination of poverty disintegrates into admiration for how his parents forced him to be kind to Sara Kline, ""a Minneota `bag lady,' years before that term became fashionable."" It's not that this isn't heartwarming, it's just that it is familiar and sometimes suffers from smugness. (May)