What would Granville Hicks think?

Despite the unsettling amount of growth in Berkshire County in recent years, it pales in comparison to that of other parts of the country where countless small towns have been drawn and quartered or swallowed up whole by strip malls, discount box stores, interstate highways and new housing tracts.

Last week, I spent several days in northern Virginia and couldn’t wait to get back to the Berkshires where our small towns remain relatively intact. Just outside D.C., literally tens of thousands of new houses have been built in the last 10 years in a smear of freshly minted suburbia spreading out to an endless horizon. It’s a bizarre landscape. Everything seems built from the sky down and appended strangely. Amidst all the new construction, you see an occasional barn silo, like a sad, shell-shocked sentry, aged and obsolete.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Granville Hicks would make of all this.

Next month will mark the 60^th anniversary of Hicks’ groundbreaking sociological study called “Small Town” (recently reissued by Fordham UniversityPress). Hicks’ object of study was his adopted hometown of Grafton, N.Y., about 10 miles west of Williamstown.

He never could’ve imagined the edgeless, centerless suburbs that define so much of modern America. Nor could Hicks have imagined how this shoe, this shirt and this clock would be made in China, Taiwan or Indonesia rather than in, say, Brockton, Troy or Bristol.

Still, this well-known literary critic knew as early as 1946 that forces were afoot that threatened the future of small towns. And he also knew firsthand what was at stake.

Hicks viewed small towns as encompassing “comprehensible society,” where people worked near where they lived, where they knew their neighbors, where there was proximity to nature, and where social classes hardly mattered.

In Grafton in the 1940s, the decline of small-scale, self-sustaining communities was already well in progress. What Hicks feared — what he prophesied — was how fast-changing economic factors could easily crack the crucible of “community” as he knew it (community, he hastened to add, could be found in city neighborhoods, too).

“Has any small town a future in this age of industrialism, urbanism, and specialization?” Hicks asked.

Today, you can replace industrialism with post-industrialism, urbanism with suburbanism and specialization with any number of transformations (the country doctor is now an HMO, the factory owner is now a multinational corporation and the family farmer is now an agribusiness). What you have is the same result Hicks feared: a peripatetic rootlessness where the once very American ideal of self-reliance and individuality detaches from its moorings and drifts perilously toward isolation and unaccountability.

In American literature, small towns are usually portrayed as either menacing domains that crush creativity (Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio”) or as holding all that is decent in American life (Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town”). Even today, small towns seem to bob up and down unnervingly in America’scollective conscious — from the wistfulness of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon to the violence of Columbine.

But in small-town life, in the cooperation and face-to-face interaction it demanded, Hicks saw — in unsentimental terms — the very values intrinsic to the American experience.

While Hicks’ book serves as a startling, case-hardened reminder of what has been lost, it also serves as a reminder of what has merely been mislaid. Indeed, Hicks’ prescriptions remain germane today (especially in places like the Berkshires where Paradise, per se, has not yet been lost).

In Grafton’s case, he acknowledged the town’s fate may well rest in being a rural bedroom community to Troy and an attractive locale for second-home owners, which, in essence, is what Grafton has become. Still, he said, towns must preserve the very attributes that give them distinction — namely, their natural beauty and their institutions (such as their churches, schools and post offices). Moreover, they must continue to attract people who see their fate inextricably linked to that of the community.

In that light, “Small Town” may well speak to a new generation seeking to reconnect with a sense of place.

Certainly, “Small Town” has inspired many fine writers who, to this day, seek to shepherd the breakneck societal changes that came with America’s post-World War II boom.

Most recently, Ron Powers’ book, “Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore,” carries

Hicks’ themes further, discussing how disconnection with community can lead to violence among the young. In “Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive,” Bill Kauffman laments the homogenization of America through the lens of his hometown of Batavia, in Upstate New York.

Hicks’ voice echoes in Kauffman’s conclusion: “I cannot conceive of a heaven that is preferable to my town. Oh, Lord, if it’s all the same with you, I’d just as soon stay here. Batavia needs its ghosts.”