The protagonist of cultural critic Chuck Klosterman’s first novel is the town of Owl, North Dakota. Lovingly rendered as a backwater settlement with 850 inhabitants, a decent grocery store, a “first-rate” Chevrolet dealership, two gas stations, seven bars (though no one goes to the Oasis Wheel), and a thriving bowling alley—Owl is the kind of town where everyone knows everything about everyone, and they’re all okay with it. During a drive across Owl, which lasts three minutes, four truck drivers will wave at you. Townsfolk boast inexplicable nicknames, some of which involve storied accidents from ill-advised use of farming equipment. And the football coach has been sleeping with seniors long enough for everyone to accept this as a minor character flaw (with the exception of the tortured senior Mitch Hrlicka, nicknamed “Vanna” for the lack of vowels in his last name). Set between August 15th, 1983 and February 4th, 1984—the time of a now-infamous blizzard in North Dakota history—Klosterman seems to posit life in a small town today is inevitably the same. When people say that nothing changes in Owl, they don’t mean it figuratively—the high school’s seniors will take over their parents farms and marry the kids they sit next to in chemistry.
Klosterman’s three narrators are linked by varying degrees of ennui. Julia Rabia is a 23-year old teacher at Owl High, assigned to the town due to her own lack of ambition. As the only new female prospect in years, Rabia fights off the attention of beer-swilling farmers like “Little Stevie Horse N’ Phone,” eventually falling for a bison farmer (awesomely named Vance Druid) too deadened to respond. Their almost romance illustrates that the most exciting part of love is what you fantasize about when you go to sleep alone. High school senior Mitch Hrlicka is the disturbed kicker on the football team, and he’s obsessed with the idea of redeeming the sins of his English teacher, football coach, and tormentor, the “Steve Martin sexy” John Laidlaw, who’s best known for convincing female classmates to have sex with him on the roof of his powder-blue Caprice Classic. Mitch is practical in the way that only isolated teenage boys can be—when asked to comment on George Orwell’s 1984, he determines that publicly validating who you’re sleeping with is probably the best way for society to operate. And Horace Jones is a widowed octogenarian content with his own complacency. He drinks coffee at 3 p.m. each day with a group of similarly-minded curmudgeons, talking only about the prospects of the football team, troubling plot points on Dallas, and the fate of political combatant Gordon Kahl. (A metaphor running flush throughout the novel, Kahl is another source of North Dakotan pride, killing two US Marshals in a shootout after refusing to pay his taxes.) Though these characters never share a scene together, they are inextricably linked by the pressures and pleasures of living an average life, struggling with their own normalcy, concluding in an epic snowstorm in which they will have to prove that they are worthy of their own existence. And though Julia, Mitch and Horace are archetypal, they also stand in for Klosterman himself.
One criticism of Downtown Owl could be its nuances of characterization, as every character, from the naïve high-schooler Mitch to a pot-stoned Julia to a resilient Horace on his fourth cup of joe, speaks in the same brisk monologue, full of rhetorical questions, configuring the logic of Goats Head Soup, or professional fighting etiquette in a clinical manner, much like the scrupulous celebrity profiles and essays that made this writer famous. Klosterman trusts these character’s thoughts, but not their feelings, and he denies them strange liberties. One could take issue with the fact that Owl’s closest love story has the actants barely hug, that two of these characters will die alone (while freezing to death!), and that none of them strike a meaningful conversation that isn’t in a bar on the validity of ELO’s guitar work. While Owl is certainly full of interesting diversions, it seems cruel to revoke your protagonists’ humanity. More importantly, the redemption that does come by the novel’s conclusion is compromised. The character that survives the snow storm returns only to live their life in the exact same way they had been living it before, proving the novel’s message: that Owl is comprised of all the same people, doing all the same things. While standing in sharp distinction from Klosterman’s previous autobiographical criticism, Downtown Owl mirrors its fatality: the worthiness of Julia, Mitch and Horace’s souls are on par with the exact validity of a KISS member’s solo album. While Ace Frehley’s was proved canonical, Peter Criss only has the right to exist.
