The Skimmer

In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time

By Peter Lovenheim

Perigee; 238 pages

What would you say if your 50-year-old neighbor asked to spend the night at your house? You might be inclined to call the police. You’d almost certainly think he was a bit weird. But that’s just what journalist Peter Lovenheim did after a brutal domestic murder-suicide rocked his tony suburban Rochester, N.Y., block. “Did I live in a community or just in a house on a street surrounded by people whose lives were entirely separate?” he wondered. Starting in 2002 and for several subsequent years, the author persuaded a handful of neighbors to let him act as a fly on their walls. What he observed was loneliness and isolation. Lovenheim’s idealistic conclusion: “All we need to do is deliberately set out to know the person next door, or across the street, or down the block; to ring the bell and open the door.” But privacy-loving Americans who find Lovenheim’s stunt nosy will be forgiven for failing to pack their sleeping bags. After all, as the Robert Frost refrain goes, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

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