What I’m Reading Now: “Downtown Owl”
Mini summary: AWESOME!
No, it’s not about an Owl that lives downtown, but rather primarily about three individuals that live in a North Dakota town named Owl. Now, you city-folk, don’t let the setting scare you off, it’s not a hick-town in-joke. It is funny though. I really can’t recommend “Downtown Owl” strongly enough if you’re 20 to 30-something (although one of the plot lines follows an elderly male widower, so the appeal may well extend past ones 30s).
Apparently, Chuck Klosterman has been around for a while and he’s a funny guy. I’ve already queued up the rest of his stuff at my local library and am seriously considering picking up a copy of “Downtown Owl” to keep.
- Image via Wikipedia
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Klosterman, who has made a name for himself as an idiosyncratic pop-cultural commentator on rock music and sports, proves just as entertaining in his first novel. In or on the edge of nondescript Owl, North Dakota, live laid-back high-school football player Mitch Hrlicka, who stands out from his peers by being exceedingly normal; teacher Julia Rabia, who has fallen in love with buffalo farmer and Rolling Stones–exclusivist Vance Druid; and old Horace Jones, who mourns his wife and has a few painful secrets. Klosterman doesn’t follow them in a conventional narrative manner. Gifted with a superb ear for dialogue, a kind of perfect pitch for the way ordinary people talk, Klosterman is also capable of fine word-portraits of the three principals and the folks orbiting them in a town whose residents have nicknames like Vanna White, Bull Calf, Grendel, and Little Stevie Horse ’n’ Phone, and time exists on its own odd terms rather than those of the novel’s setting, the 1980s. Despite their eccentricities, or maybe because of them, one believes in these people and their often improbable yet always credible stories. Think of this as a literary relative of the movies Fargo and American Graffiti, sans the latter’s cruising Main Street and warm weather, with a poignant and tragic edge to it, conferred by a paralyzing and deadly blizzard in February 1984. –June Sawyers –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Boston Globe
“An astonishingly moving book, a minor masterpiece in the genre we might call small-town quirkiana.”
From The Washington Post
“It’s tempting to compare this novel with Sherwood Anderson’s classic portrait of small-town American life, Winesburg, Ohio. But no one in Winesburg listened to Ozzy Osbourne. And Klosterman is much funnier than Anderson.”
