Book #5: Downtown Owl

Chuck Klosterman is the sort of writer I would strive to be, if I had the optimistic outlook to try my hand at legitimate writing for a living. Intellectual, but not too snarky (there IS a bit of matter-of-factedness about him, though it's rarely in the context of "you should know this", but rather "I just happen to know this. It is what it is, and I have no rationalization for knowing this seemingly trivial information), Klosterman has written books that I have devoured in rapid succession before, including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; Fargo Rock City; IV; and his most recent release, Eating the Dinosaur (which I finished the week before I hatched this five-year plan...bummer).

His books are an infusion of music of all genres, history, and pop culture seemingly ad nauseum. There's a catch to it, though: it's all brought up and deconstructed in a way that harkens back to earning an English degree. When debating the importance (long-term) of Britney Spears' influence on the world (or at least impressionable young girls in the earliest years of the 21st century), Klosterman takes what again seems like (and- admittedly- is, in the grand scheme of things) a trivial matter and dissects it with the vigor and technical ability of a lit. theorist. What ensues is entertaining to me because of its ability to make you think about such outlandish things.

Anyway, Downtown Owl represents Klosterman's first foray into fiction. The story acts as sort of a Rules of Attraction type of novel set in the 1980s (83-84) in rural North Dakota, where the lives of three individuals who are vaguely linked in a small town where everyone knows everyone, though in what comes across as a vacuum to someone who grew up in a town of more than a few hundred people. Part of what I like about Klosterman's style in this book is that he so easily switches from the perspectives of Horace, Mitch, and Julia, while adopting their perspectives of empty and judgmental, apathetic but curious, and bewildered and longing for more, respectively. The different characters have the same sort of dismal routines with their own reasons for coming into said routines, and while none of them are outstandingly likeable, I found myself rooting for any of them to get out of Owl and into an environment which might have been more personally gratifying or rewarding.

Of course, tied into this are the essential references to MTV, Judas Priest, and other mainstays of the 80s which take Mitch in particular by surprise...amazing to think of MTV as a so-new-it's-foreign-to-a-teen concept, rather than a network which wore itself out a decade ago. If you've read any of Klosterman's non-fiction work (I suggest Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs for starters), this will read in a similar fashion, though the task for you the reader is to take that matter-of-fact tone and apply it to three fictional characters. Either way, it was a quick and fairly entertaining read. The ending caught me a little off-guard, as if his intent was to say that the main characters- consciously or not- longed for something out of the ordinary, but when it came, they had not a clue what to do.