Reporters and writers of non-fiction run into trouble when, as their story begins to take shape, they decide that that story speaks a larger truth about Us As [Adjective] Americans. Us As 21st-Century Americans, Us As Small-Town Americans, Us As Americans Knocked Back By Economic Hardship — take your pick, but whichever Americans the author now feels qualified to generalize about, it's still generalizing, and it's still an irritant.
Whether it indicates a compulsion on the part of non-fiction editors to insist on an overarching principle or sociological conclusion, or whether former city-desk editors who spend a couple of months "in the interior" genuinely believe that yet another minutely observed comparison between a small town's two contrasting coffee shops — complete with overwritten conflation of foamed milk with loss of the moral compass — is as thick with significance as the black coffee consumed without foof in the morally superior (but still condescended to) diner, it's hard to say. Regardless of the rationale, nothing can becalm my interest in a non-fiction narrative quite like a sweeping statement on small-town life.