DO-CK
Downtown Owl, by Chuck Klosterman – I became a pretty big Chuck Klosterman fan after reading Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, although halfway through that I realised that he could also be fairly hit and miss and become a bit wanky too. This is Klosterman’s first novel, and while it is well written, it quickly became apparent that as such he consciously decided to hold off on that which I love most about his unique writing style, which is his wry and sarcastic pop culture observations – view that are usually more than a little bit twisted.
This condition pops up exactly once in the book, during a flirtatious conversation between the two most interesting characters in the book about the Rolling Stones (the girl asks the guy what kind of music he listens to, he says he only listens to the Rolling Stones – all other bands are gay, especially Led Zeppelin). There are also references to newly-released albums, such as Van Halen’s 1984, and Klosterman excells at describing the frustrations of high school life. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, which means that there’s plenty of fleshing out of the individuals, who enjoy rich character development. The principle of the book, of course, is the innate mundanity of life in a very small town in North Dakota and the characters who inhabit the town who are eccentric in terms of their absolute, through-to-the-bone normality, and the town runs on a different social rhythm than most places. The book runs with near clockwork precision through all of the themes of classic story-telling: man versus nature, man versus man, man versus himself. By the end of the book, all three of these come to a head in an interesting and unique climax that combines both comedy and tragedy. All of this proceeds with very little sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll to stand in the way of the plot development (what little of it there is).
Klosterman paints a vivid picture of life – including both old age and puberty – in small town America. This does not make for a thrilling read, although there is still something oddly compelling about it nonetheless. It’s a short read and generally enjoyable in a non-Klosterman kind of way, and I get the sense that this is what Klosterman set out to do anyway. I dog-eared exactly one page of this book, page 184, probably because it used a word I had never seen before (isomorphism – a biological term that indicates “similarity in form, as in organisms of different ancestry”), and referenced a cultural figure I know nothing about (Rollie Fingers, a former Major League Baseball relief pitcher known for his eccentric waxed curled-tip mustache).
RF