DOWNTOWN OWL
Chuck Klosterman
Scribner
Fiction
Hardcover: 9781416544180
Paperback: 9781416544197
Owl, North Dakota is a very small town. With less than 1,000 inhabitants, everyone seems to know everyone. It is 1983, and the old men meet for coffee and nostalgia, and the young men meet for beer, reliving football glory days. Just six months before a devastating storm hits this sleepy burg, readers of Chuck Klosterman's wonderful debut work of fiction are introduced to three Owl citizens: Mitch, Julia and Horace. Despite the apparent lack of excitement in Owl, these three, and their friends and family, lead interesting and compelling lives, deftly rendered by Klosterman.
Mitch Hrlicka is a high school football player in Owl. He is smart and introspective, a bit more thoughtful than most of his friends but still a typical teenage boy in many ways. He fantasizes about killing his sleazy but intellectually provocative English teacher (Mr. Laidlaw, who is also his football coach, has impregnated at least two of his students and has assigned Orwell's 1984 to the entire school), and he fantasizes about the outcome of a fight between the school’s two loosest canons. He disdains popular music, and his bedroom is devoid of personal objects. He is totally different from and yet completely the same as all the other kids in Owl.
Julia Rabia just moved to Owl from the big city, accepting a teaching position. At 23, she is not quite over her college party days and finds herself drinking away her loneliness and mild depression in Owl's many bars every night. Because she is new to town and single, she is the most attractive woman to Owl's unmarried men, and they all hope she will go out with them (to see E.T. before the town's local movie theater is scheduled to shut down). But it is the enigmatic Vance Druid, a famous football has-been, who catches her eye. Their courting is both hilarious and sad as they try to navigate a situation they seem incapable of handling normally.
Horace Jones has lived in Owl all of his 73 years. He and his cronies meet every afternoon for coffee, conversing about the weather, local football and the wars they fought or didn't fight in. A widower, Horace is content and serene, though he misses his wife. He occupies his time with friends, the farm and nonfiction. Horace though has two dark secrets he has shared with no one. He represents the full life lived in Owl, while Mitch is the town's young man full of potential and Julia is the outsider slowly becoming a full member of the community.
DOWNTOWN OWL is a funny book and yet still quite serious, focusing on identity and opportunity, survival (literal and figurative) and propriety. While everyone in Owl is concerned with appearances and maintaining the status quo, they all live rich, complex and surprising inner lives. Klosterman proves and disproves all the conventional wisdom about small towns and still manages to give readers universal themes.
The characters in this well-written book are likable, quirky and real without being two-dimensional. As witty and clever as DOWNTOWN OWL is, however, it is also heartbreaking. Despite its emotional heft, it is easy to devour in a long cold winter night or two, hunkered down like the citizens of Owl themselves. It is best though (for reasons that won't be mentioned here) not to read it on a windy night.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
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