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Chuck
Klosterman is something of a pop-culture king. His nonfiction
efforts, including Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Fargo
Rock City, chronicle not only his freelance career as
a music writer for Spin magazine, but also his fascination
with heavy metal, sports metaphors, television, and film.
His debut novel, Downtown Owl, combines these somewhat
classic Klosterman elements into a small, fictional North
Dakotan town. The result falls somewhere between Fargo
and Dazed and Confused in a deep well of semi-rural
midwestern life and death.
Klosterman's
small town of Owl is the kind of place where people grow up,
play football, get married, have kids, and begin the cycle
again without ever crossing the state line. Big things happen,
but they're typically centered on weather events, the occasional
oddball marriage, or sports plays that become legend. Klosterman's
restraint in depicting Owl is somewhat remarkable, considering
his predilection for tangent. The residents of Owl are mostly
homegrown locals, with lasting and slightly unfortunate nicknames
(such as Cubby Candy, Grendel, Zebra, and Dog Lover) and lives
that everyone seems to have either played witness to or heard
about in generally accepted detail. One gets the feeling that
although this story takes place in 1983, it could just as
easily have happened in 1883, or 2003.
Three
main characters dominate Downtown Owl in a series of
basically unremarkable but gradually revealing vignettes.
Mitch is a disaffected junior at Owl High School who, as of
late, has been fantasizing about killing his philandering
football coach (who, as it is, impregnated a small string
of teenage girls). Horace is a regular for three o'clock coffee
hours, serving as a common town historian while oft remembering
his dead wife. Julia, the newest Owl import, is a young high
school teacher, fresh out of college and ready to make a difference
but not quite ready for the brunt of real life. While this
trio is the dominant focus, don't expect any overlap; the
characters may inhabit the same small town, but they hardly
interact with each other. While their interaction isn't necessary,
Klosterman's structure (substituted for chapters are dated
sections from the perspectives of both the trio and other
Owl residents) creates a sort of disconnect; instead of coming
off like small pieces of a greater story, the characters come
across as irrelevant, like small pieces of a great nothing.
Klosterman
spends a lot of time setting the stage in Owl, though. The
town operates as usual as the lens pans over Owl in a sort
of weird time lapse: Julia morphs from introvert to extrovert
in a matter of a few beers, Mitch gains an unsteady but present
voice, and Horace meditates on local legend Gordon Kahl (who,
as the story goes, refused to pay taxes, shot two federal
marshals, escaped, and was later killed in Arkansas). While
Klosterman's midwestern and early 80s aesthetic can be entertaining
and even relaxing, the book lags for exactly the same reason.
At one point, Julia details her now comfortable Owl life,
remarking on the townspeople she has befriended. Instead of
creating a general evolution of thoughts for the character,
Klosterman uses this moment to interject character sketches
in a bar of desperate grown men. Found nearly halfway through
the book, it comes off as overkill. Readers don't need to
be filled in on every townsperson's back story.
It takes
a while to get used to Klosterman's style, to resign oneself
to the fact that there is basically no plot. Owl is the place
where new things are rare and being too "out there" is kind
of a big deal. Perhaps the most literal and significant development
throughout book is a blizzard which causes a temporary standstill
and even takes the life of one of the major characters.
Downtown
Owl is neither particularly good nor particularly bad.
For a fiction debut, Klosterman has definitely made a good
choice in not departing too far from what he knows. The characters
in Owl are both unique and realistic; not only are they late,
but some social trends regularly evade them. Klosterman demonstrates
that while pop culture might abound in some places, it certainly
doesn't rule these relatively rural lives. In truth, Klosterman
sums it up at the beginning. "You know, people always say
that nothing changes in a small town, but—whenever they
say that—they usually mean that nothing changes figuratively,"
the Owl High School principal tells Julia when she first arrives.
"The truth is that nothing changes literally. It's always
the same people, doing the same things."
(November,
2008)
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