Review: Gary Rivlin’s Saving Main Street

From 9/11 to the Great Recession, epoch-defining events often provide a windfall for America’s largest publishing houses. Yet, five years after 2020, the highbrow pandemic book wave has yet to materialize. Instead, COVID became the fodder for self-published books and conservative polemics beyond a handful of novelists and literary essayists who couldn’t pass up on the dramatic potential. 

Much of the pandemic lit deficit likely stems from cocksure establishment media types too proud to issue a mea culpa for their support of grocery wipedowns and one-way aisles. But some legacy journalists like Gary Rivlin still demonstrate an unwavering belief in clear-eyed assessment, which elevates his latest book, Saving Main Street: Small Business in the Time of COVID-19 into a must read even for those who don’t care to revisit the madness.

In the early days of the pandemic, Rivlin set out to profile small business owners in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania, a hotbed of rising Trump support that has turned the state into presidential politics’ ground zero. Unspooling in an observational style, Saving Main Street brings together the stories of a host of smalltown community pillars, including a Rust Belt Italian restaurant, a Venezuelan immigrant-owned salon, a local Hallmark franchise, and a mid-priced furniture store. 

Thanks to his focus on a wide-swath of small businesses, Rivlin retraces how the pandemic’s various stages affected each. Some wither under lockdown measures. Others navigate a holiday season ruined by supply chain issues or the staffing shortages spawned by runaway unemployment payments. Most telling, the Bronx small-town chocolate business he throws in for good measure finds itself in the spotlight in June 2020 after years teetering on the edge of oblivion when the aftermath of George Floyd rage results in a sudden financial boon and attention from Martha Stewart.

Refreshingly, the bogeyman of Rifkin’s book is not Trump, but Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, the “pinch-faced technocrat” who rode his family’s kitchen fixture company to millions and drove restaurants and other nonessential establishments into the ground with arbitrary closures despite that The Science never found significant proof such businesses were hotbeds of transmission.

Amid his faint praise for MAGA World figures like Steve Mnuchin and Marco Rubio, the book taps into the populist undercurrent that explains Pennsylvania’s 2024 rightward swing and the rise of a rough and tumble figure like John Fetterman to the national spotlight. “A political system under the control of a small cabal of corporate titans is an unhealthy one,” he writes. “The self-reliance (and diffused power) of the small business class is a bulwark against the state.” For Rivlin, deplorable Pennsylvania provided the ultimate microcosm of such bulwark politics and the working class heroes that came out in droves four years later to alter the fabric of the republic.

Saving Main Street is available at bookstores everywhere.