Downtown Owl
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Now a major film! New York Times bestselling author and “one of America’s top cultural critics” (Entertainment Weekly) Chuck Klosterman’s debut novel brilliantly captures the charm and dread of small-town life.
Somewhere in rural North Dakota, there is a fictional town called Owl. They don’t have cable. They don’t really have pop culture, but they do have grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. But that’s not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it’s perfect. Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. A history teacher, she gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer. Widower and local conversationalist Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. They all know each other completely, except that they’ve never met. But when a deadly blizzard—based on an actual storm that occurred in 1984—hits the area, their lives are derailed in unexpected and powerful ways. An unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where local mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing, Downtown Owl is “a satisfying character study and strikes a perfect balance between the funny and the profound” (Publishers Weekly).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four books of nonfiction (Fargo Rock City; Klosterman IV; etc.) and a steady magazine presence have established Klosterman as a pop culture writer known for his air-quotes wit. There's plenty of that sensibility in his first novel, and fans and detractors alike may be pleasantly surprised to find Klosterman delving beneath the quirky surfaces of Owl, N. Dak., the "overtly idyllic" but "paradoxically menacing" town that provides a perfect backdrop for the author's sense of humor. (The time in which the novel takes place 1983, an era of Def Leppard and feathered hair tickles the author's love of the vapid.) The book shifts perspective among three Owl residents: Mitch, a smart teenager who's "not clutch" on the football field or with girls; Julia, a teacher fresh out of college and discovering an affinity for booze and beaus; and Horace, a widower whose life revolves around coffee and bull sessions. Though no single narrative line binds the three the event that ultimately unites them is a creaking deus ex machina Klosterman creates a satisfying character study and strikes a perfect balance between the funny and the profound.
