Chuck Klosterman and I have always had a tenuous relationship. Actually, it is Kosterman's work that I have so often found difficult to relate too. It has always been something that was a little too clever and ironic and, at the same time, proud of being such. This, however, is not true of his first novel Downtown Owl. In this work, Klosterman disappears to let his fiction roam around the desolate prairie of rural North Dakota, and his work seems comfortable there.
Mitch Hrlicka, or Vanna to his friends and coaches, plays football (though not very well), and spends his high school daze riding through Owl on Friday nights and debating which of the two iconic meat heads in his class would win in a fight pitched against one another. He is unassuming but relatively popular in the way that every high school student from a town of eight hundred must be relatively so. He has trouble relating, though, at the same time, he is hung on by a standard of friends (one of whom is named Zebra (rhymes with Debra)).
Julia Rabia, as we are constantly reminded, is just about the only available woman in Owl. Every man without a mate falls on top of himself to buy her drinks, offer her compliments, and become her friend. Julia won't accept any dates, which according to her best friend, Naomi, are almost the equivalents of engagement rings, but she does try admirably to remember all of the names and nicknames of the various bar-haunting citizens. Predictably, Julia falls for Vance Druid, the one man who hasn't fallen for him. Vance is relatively famous the way Mitch Hrlicka is relatively popular: it only counts in a small town. He had the good fortune to be involved in one spectacular football play that made it all the way to The NFL Today the way civil rights abuses make it to the supreme court. What seems most special about Vance is the distance he puts between himself and everyone else. This is the distance, of course, that attracts Julia; it is the distance, of course, that makes their love a sort of chase.
Finally, Horace Jones is a widower. He is a man how has seen it all and has opinions on most of it. Destined for war but denied his destiny, he lives alone in his old farmhouse outside of Owl and drinks coffee with his own crowd of aging men. There is little special about Horace except for his collection of spy books, his unfortunate skill at being conned, and his dead wife, whom he may or may not have murdered to save her the pain of remaining awake without reprieve. Horace is what the young men of Owl become once they are done being young and done being men.
These are the stories of Owl leading up to the fantastic blizzard that hits the town in February, 1984, and if it seems to you that most of Downtown Owl is a detailed character description, you'd be right. Klosterman has written a novel with sparkling prose and level-headed wit, but he did not include a driving plot until the final 30 or so pages. The action picks up once the blizzard hits and these lives we've grown to know so well are finally put at risk. If the characters were not so brilliantly flawed and so easily identifiable, Klosterman would have a tough sell on his hands. As it stands, however, even this lack of plotting is pulled of with style as long as the book's binding is in a patient reader's hands. The voices are authentic and avoid cliché, while the pristine ending manages emotion with a deft hand. Downtown Owl will appeal to most readers who enjoy reading about the small-town life and can make it to the end.
Downtown Owl
—2008-11-25 10:47:43
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