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“Some people scoffed in the New York publishing establishment, literally scoffed,” he said, “and we were energized by that kind of provinciality.”

Gascons are for the most part proud of their provinciality, and many of them have developed the curious habit of describing their bucolic land in terms of all the things it doesn’t have: big cities, mass tourism, traffic, urban stress, high-speed rail service, autoroutes, soaring real estate prices, hordes of Parisians snapping up summer homes and so on.

But that Balkanization has led to a sort of fan provinciality—when you have the ability to watch only your team, you end up not watching any others, really.

When Mr. Bush’s brother George first ran for president, he erroneously referred to Greeks as “Grecians,” flubbed the name of India’s leader and confused Slovenia with Slovakia, offering the world an unabashed portrait of provinciality.

That return to home—whether instinctive or didactic—seems to have been shared by a preponderance of the writers, not necessarily as a retreat into provinciality but as an uncovering of vernacular riches found in unlikely places: a salutary identity politics of the idiolect.