Owl Be Seein' You, in Owl the Old Familiar Places
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Author: Chuck Klosterman
Title: Downtown Owl Genre: fiction I grew up in a small town - not as small as Owl, North Dakota, perhaps; but small: my entire school system was half the size of many a big city high school graduating class. That history makes it particularly amusing to me when I see native New Yorkers or Angelenos attempting to set their fiction in a small town. Somehow it always comes out half "Andy of Mayberry" and half "The Last Picture Show," although in the latter case, at least Larry McMurty actually knows something about small towns. But I digress... so when I heard about Chuck Klosterman's novel Downtown Owl, set in a bucolic North Dakota village of about 850, I thought I'd give it the reality check. The good news is that it's real - author Chuck Klosterman is, after all, a native of a town not much larger than the fictional Owl. The bad news is, "So what?" Downtown Owl ambles along at the speed of molasses, viewed almost entirely through the eyes of three Owlians... Owlites... whatever, as the calendar flips from 1983 to 1984. There's high-school junior Mitch Hrlicka (nicknamed Vanna, as in "I'd like to buy a vowel"); third-string football quarterback only because there aren't fourth-string QBs. Over yonder in the Owl Café sits septuagenarian farmer Horace Jones, a widower with a life so routine that he probably doesn't need to open his eyes in the morning. And last but not least, there's Owl's newest resident: Julia Rabia, big-city girl "called" to teach social studies to Owl's middle-schoolers (and perhaps to coach volleyball, a sport she's never played). As a sixteen-year-old; Mitch leads a normal sixteen-year-old small-towner's life, meaning he and his friends cruise the main drag in the evening and argue endlessly over who would win a fight between the high school's eternal bad boy (probably "bad" because his name is Cubby Candy) and the class giant, "Grendel" (makes you wonder who in Owl has read Beowulf, eh?). His days are filled with wondering why the football coach/English teacher wants him to read Orwell's 1984 (look at the calendar, Mitch!) and how that same football coach can get away with impregnating a string of high school girls. Julia, who smoked 75% of her emergency pot stash the day she arrived in town, seems to focus only on which of the town's three bars she should get drunk in tonight - that and, perhaps, how a girl from Wisconsin can be expected to teach North Dakota history. And Horace? His life is filled with such minutiae as wondering about whether he needs to declare his liar's poker winnings on his 1040. Such, it appears, is the pace of life in Owl, North Dakota, circa 1983... If you've ever thought that growing up in a small, isolated town would be boring, you'd be convinced of it after finishing Downtown Owl. Nothing happens in Owl that hasn't happened every day for as long as anyone can remember. The same six elderly gents play liar's poker to decide who'll pay for coffee... every morning. The same three people - Julia, fellow teacher Nadine, and Nadine's friend (though not husband) Ted - get wasted together... every night. The same argument plays out when Mitch and friends Zebra and Curtis-Fritz get in a car... every time. Life in Chuck Klosterman's Owl, to put it mildly, is dull and repetitive - which, I am certain, made it most difficult to keep Downtown Owl from exhibiting the same malaise. Klosterman succeeds, though only just barely, in keeping his debut novel moderately interesting - though I imagine that it's more interesting to the urbane critics who haven't actually had to live in one of the thousands of Owls that dot rural America than it is to Philistines who grew up in Podunk. Perhaps had his ending been less... I'm looking for a word, and "contrived" just doesn't cut it... perhaps had his ending been less forced, the novel would have been as good as some of those reviewers think it is. It's not, though, which is too bad: Klosterman's vignettes of small-town life are cruelly accurate and at times hilarious - though that hilarity doesn't survive its repetition in every third chapter. Clearly, Klosterman's well aware that two out of three small-town residents are fish out of water. And that awareness is most obvious in the rather sudden conclusion to his story. Pop culture essayist Klosterman ("Spin" and ESPN) steps out of the essay zone, for which he is best known, and into fiction writing in Downtown Owl. Now, I have a co-worker whose wife is a well-known true-crime writer; an author who recently broke genre and wrote her first novel. Some of her fans are loyal enough to snap up anything she writes; some are peeved that she stepped out of her (or perhaps more accurately, their) comfort zone. Klosterman fans seem to be almost monolithic in their belief that anything Klosterman writes is golden, including this novel. Sadly, I'm here to let you know that it's not: with Downtown Owl, Klosterman doesn't earn the gold, he merely takes bronze. |