North Mountain, New Hampshire, is the small New Hampshire village where Garp investigates a possible Fields Foundation fellowship for Harriet Truckenmiller, the wife of Kenny Truckenmiller, who assassinated Jenny Fields. The visit takes him to Harriet’s kitchen-based beauty salon and into the family’s daily life, placing a private household beside the public image of a notorious killer. Garp returns home from the trip in time to celebrate Ellen James’s first publication, so the village becomes a short, revealing detour in the account of his Foundation work and family life.

Setting and Foundation Mission

Garp’s visit begins as an assignment for the Fields Foundation. He describes his purpose as determining whether a Foundation fellowship would be wasted on a woman named Truckenmiller, and sets out for North Mountain, New Hampshire. The mission is framed as an evaluation of Harriet’s eligibility and prospects, not as a visit to Kenny, who is no longer alive.

The trip is also part of a broader pattern of activity that Helen regards as a diversion from writing. She groups Garp’s Foundation work with more bookshelves, politics, and crusades, and objects that these are things people do when they cannot write. Her complaint gives the journey a domestic context: Garp’s outward-facing mission carries him away from the house while Helen remains unconvinced that such work answers his creative difficulties.

Nanette’s Beauty Salon

The named salon is not a separate commercial premises: Nanette’s Beauty Salon is actually the kitchen of Mrs. Kenny Truckenmiller, whose first name is Harriet. Garp approaches her timidly from the outside steps and asks whether she is Nanette. Harriet corrects him, saying that there is no Nanette and identifying herself by her own name. The mismatch between the salon’s French-sounding business name and the woman’s identity becomes a small sign of how the village’s modest setting differs from the outside world Garp brings with him.

Harriet’s home and business occupy the same room. The kitchen contains ordinary food and household items alongside a shampoo hose, a three-way mirror framed with lights, hair products, and a suspended dryer. The mixed arrangement makes the salon an extension of the family home rather than a polished, separate workplace. The surrounding yard is similarly marked by deferred upkeep: cars that may not run, unstacked firewood, and an antenna leaning against the house. These details locate Garp’s fellowship inquiry in a setting of limited resources and practical domestic labor.

The dog at the doorway initially blocks Garp’s entrance, but Harriet keeps it from reaching him and then brings it under control when it pushes toward the outer door. Her handling of the animal establishes her authority within her own home. Garp, who has come to have his hair attended to, is the visitor in this encounter; Harriet determines when he can enter and when she must get dressed before proceeding.

Harriet’s Family and Public Image

Photographs in the salon connect Harriet’s present life to her family history. One shows her wedding to Kenny; another shows her pregnant with a baby, with a second child beside her. A further photograph depicts Dickie beside Kenny and a deer they had shot. Garp recognizes the image from a national magazine that circulated after Jenny Fields’s assassination. In that coverage, the photograph had been used to suggest that Kenny was a born killer, joining the fact that he shot Jenny to an earlier image of him with a dead deer.

The photograph’s appearance in Harriet’s home changes its significance. Outside North Mountain, it had served as an image attached to Kenny’s violence; in the salon, it hangs among family photographs of marriage and children. The contrast does not erase Kenny’s crime. Instead, it shows how a public image of the assassin occupies space within the home of his wife and children, while Harriet continues her work and family life in its shadow.

When Garp asks why she chose the name Nanette, Harriet explains that she thought it sounded French. She recognizes that Garp comes from beyond North Mountain and laughs at her own choice. The exchange makes the name less a claim to sophistication than an improvised business identity, chosen by someone conscious of the distance between her village and the outside world.

Visit’s Close and Narrative Significance

Garp’s encounter with the Truckenmiller family closes without a dramatic reconciliation or a stated decision about the fellowship. Dickie says he liked Kenny but believed Kenny had become irreparably sick in his attitude toward women, recalling that he had behaved badly toward both Harriet and Jenny. Garp calls it a terrible thing, and Dickie returns to splitting wood. Their brief exchange places Kenny’s violence within the family’s retrospective understanding without offering an excuse for it.

As Garp leaves, Dickie compliments his hair, and Harriet waves from the salon window without intending to encourage him. Garp drives through the village, stops at its one diner and one gas station, and notices that people look at his newly styled hair. He continues to notice it in mirrors on the drive home. These small details give the return journey a comic, self-conscious counterpoint to the serious purpose of his visit.

Garp reaches home in time for the celebration of Ellen James’s first publication. The timing links the remote Foundation errand to a major development in the household: while Garp is away assessing a possible fellowship for Harriet, Ellen’s work is appearing in a widely read magazine. North Mountain is therefore both a place encountered on a practical mission and a narrative interval between the pressures Helen associates with Garp’s public crusades and the family’s celebration of Ellen’s achievement.