Flem Snopes' Bungalow in The Town (Location)

Flem and Eula Snopes live in "a small rented house in a back street near the edge of town" (9). Behind it is it is a big ditch where Gowan hides "every afternoon for almost a week" watching to see if his Uncle Gavin is spying on Mrs. Snopes (55). The house itself has a "flimsy porch" or "gallery" on which Flem sits and keeps an eye on the water tank after resigning his post at the power plant (30, 31). Referred to as "Mrs. Snopes's house" and "Linda's house" by various narrators, Chick Mallison speculates that Flem must have bought it after he became vice president of the bank "because they had begun to fix it up. It was painted now and Mrs. Snopes I reckon had had the wistaria arbor in the side yard fixed up" and hung the hammock under it (198). When Gavin Stevens visits Eula he learns that Flem indeed purchased the house four years previously. It was also Flem who acquired the furnishings from a store in Memphis, paying the owner's wife to select the pieces. According to Gavin, the house is decorated to be a reproduction of a photograph in "say Town and Country labeled American Interior" (231): "the coffee, the low table, the two intimate chairs" that Gavin views as an "assault not on the glands nor even just the stomach but on the civilised soul which believes it thirsts to be civilised" (231).