Customer Reviews

Downtown Owl

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(38)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I was hesitant to post a review of Downtown Owl, because I'm somewhat partial to the works of the author. I've loved all of Klosterman's books, and have always thought that his essays deserve their place alongside the finer works of the past ten years. However, if no one else is going to say it, I will--this book was simply okay. For a first stab at fiction, I would say it was just `good.'

People--myself included--are fast to rave about Klosterman's work, and one previous review even said that the writer `wouldn't have known it was Klosterman had the name not been listed on the cover. Really? The mentioning of obscure eighties rock songs, deep debate over the creative merits of the Rolling Stones, and Black Sabbath/heavy metal references didn't remind you of any certain author's favorite topics? To me it was obvious, but I confess that it didn't bother me. That's who Klosterman is and it's natural to think that some of his music essay writings would bleed into his fictional work. In my opinion, it doesn't discredit the work at all--in fact I welcome it--but to say it doesn't exist is ridiculous.

Downtown Owl's most powerful feature may be Klosterman's characters and their introspective dialogue. Such self-reflective accounts allow readers to develop a connection to each one, even if they are have nothing in common. Also, the pace of the book--though this may be idiotic to say--sort of mirrors the pace of life in small towns like Owl. Life moves a bit slower there, and the pace of the book stays congruent with that.

The main flaw of the book, in my opinion, is the latter part of the book where the storm begins to move in. Mitch, for example, is blown backwards--with apparently no idea of what just hit him. I feared it might be a supernatural force or an atomic bomb, only to find out . . it's a storm? I'm not familiar with weather patterns in North Dakota, but most storms I've witnessed can be seen at least a minute or two in advance. The speed at which the fierce weather enters, surrounds, and confines the characters is beyond unrealistic, and comes across as if (a) the author grew tired of writing or (b) his car was double parked while scratching out the last few chapters.

Overall, it's a good book. And yes, I liked it. But let's just leave it at that, and not inflate the book's significance or gravity just because we are so used to the author's previous--and more superior--pieces of work.

Guess what? Chuck Klosterman wrote a novel and it's good and it's nothing like his non-fiction pop culture essays. In fact, were I given the book not knowing the author, I would never have guessed.

After I saw an advertisement for a Klosterman event calling him "the next Hunter S. Thompson," I got very upset because, Klosterman, Hunter S. Thompson, you are not. I suddenly had a very irrational hatred for Klosterman. I thought Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs was pretty good. I didn't always agree with him, but at least when he was wrong, he was entertainingly wrong. Suddenly I hated that book and thought he was incredibly stupid and not very clever at all in retrospect. This novel, Downtown Owl, changed my mind. Klosterman is cool once more.

Downtown Owl reminds me in tone and texture of a Mark Haddon novel or David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. It has the same humor as Franzen's The Corrections with less resolution. Chuck does an amazing job with the small-town Midwest and most amazingly - he somehow writes the early-to-mid 80's without seeming nostalgic or silly or even dated. Chuck displays his encyclopedic knowledge of film and music throughout but manages to make the release of E.T. seem current. The real trick, the real page-turner is that the struggles of his characters are as universal today as they were over twenty years ago. Downtown Owl lacks the rough edges and narrative mistakes of many first novels and rolls heavy with both wit and tragedy.

The one critique I see coming for this novel is that it could be argued that there is a lack of plot. This novel could be Dazed and Confused if that film was spliced with extra narratives, one from a teacher at the school and another from an old man who spends his afternoons talking in a cafe with other elderly farmers. The novel covers August of '83 through February of '84, but it is never more than "This is what happened to these people." One could argue there is no resolution because there were never any conflicts to resolve, and the few that did exist were sidestepped.

Ultimately, this comes down to the question, "Is it the journey or the destination?" Your enjoyment of this book may very well depend on your answer.

it doesn't work. now, i know that this review will be marked as 'unhelpful' simply because people don't agree with my opinion (which isn't really the point of the helpful / unhelpful review exercise), but i felt i ought to weigh in anyway. i feel like i see eye to eye with klosterman on a number of things (judging by his nonfiction, which is tremendously good), but i don't agree with the structure he chose or what he thinks is important in the construction of a good novel.

first of all, the book comes off as a vehicle for clever analogies and metaphors, which are great strengths in his writing, but in the fiction realm, they don't stand to further the ultimately bland characters. i came to the book expecting little by way of plot (due to an article in esquire in which he espoused a love for movies where nothing happens) and generally, the lack of plot doesn't bother me, but that's not what sinks this book. it's the dialogue. the lack of contractions, the sentences, everything just seems forced. unfortunately, the only really compelling character (julia) loses a TON of steam with her romantic pursuits, which kill her charm and interest factor in full.

i love the idea of 'downtown owl' and parts of it are hilarious and charming, but there's nothing affecting at all. it's a pretty disappointing first book and i don't see improvement on the horizon. the man knows what he likes; i just don't think it worked for him here. and honestly, i hope he doesn't try again. i hope we just get more great nonfiction, which is his first love and greatest strength. this just seems a bit like a poorly constructed and executed experiment.

At first glance, perhaps, you might not think that there would be much here, and in this you'd be very wrong. At the end of the book, on page 273, I found myself wishing that I had another 300-400 pages still to go, but I was unwilling to downgrade the novel to 4 stars for the Atropos-like snipping of the threads. Owl, North Dakota, is a small town with decling population (down to about 850), like much of rural North Dakota. The only movie theater is closing (as was the case in the similarly-flavored Last Picture Show). That leaves the bowling alley and the bars: for more excitement and better shopping you must drive 40 miles to Jamestown (pop 14K) or 75 miles to Bismarck (55K).

The story centers on a number of townspeople. There's the new teacher Julia, whose commute to the Owl High from the only apartment house in Owl is 3 minutes, students Mitch (the third-string quarterback on the football team, with much less football talent than his 11-year-old sister), Grendel and Cubby, whose lack of mental talents is overcompensated for by belligerence, football coach Laidlaw, who always seems to be impregnating students in the English class he teaches, Horace Jones, whose primary entertainment is playing poker dice in Harley's Cafe to see who pays for coffee, and others. It's a bleak and isolated existence: there is little opportunity for variety. Julia, for example, goes out to the same bar each evening and the same people are always there. For Horace in Harley's Cafe, there are only 10 topics of conversation (as the author lists them): these include Owl's athletic teams, the price of wheat, plotlines on the TV show Dallas (the story takes place in 1983). The sameness would be numbing for most of us--but in an isolated small town where the nearest metropolis with a population of 100,000 is 300 miles away, and years before the Internet, you don't really have any choice. You can move away (one of the reasons for ND's rural population decline) or you can stay.

What the author manages to do here is to make the life in Owl compelling and fascinating--which isn't easy. There are plenty of novels about small-town life (the best, perhaps, is T.R. Pearson's A Short History of a Small Place) but the difficulty lies in drawing the reader into what might seem to be mundane and trivial problems. So we follow Julia's search for a suitable boyfriend, we wait to see if Grendel and Cubby Candy fight each other, we see if the Owl football team goes 5-4 (a successful season) or 4-5 (fire Coach Laidlaw!). Pearson in A Short History produced the same kind of involvement over small things. The novel has a delightful whimsical dark humor. You need to have humor here--if you take everything totally seriously, it would be very depressing. If you've lived in a small town (as I have, where the "city"--population 1500--was 15 miles away) much of the story will strike a chord. If you're a big-city person, this may seem a bit like some kind of strange science-fiction novel. It's a tale carefully and lovingly told, a tale reflective of life in some of the more rural parts of the country. A fine novel, but again, way too short!

I began listening to "Downtown Owl" with no small amount of trepidation. My only previous experience with Chuck Klosterman had been "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" which I put down after 10 pages. If there's something more tedious than a celebrity pontificating, it's someone pontificating about celebrities. But I noticed "Downtown Owl" was a novel and so I decided to take a chance on it.

I'm very glad I did. Despite his previous tedious windbaggery, Klosterman really wrote a good book.

The story is set in a small North Dakota town, and takes place in the months leading up to a monster storm. The point of view rotates among various residents of the town, some sympathetic, some not. As the novel unfolds, you learn more and more about each character, sometimes to your dismay. But it is the storm itself that ultimately forces each character to learn about himself.

Depending on the particular character, each chapter is either an inner dialogue or dialogue between characters. In either case, the characters are sharp-tongued and well-spoken. It's almost as if the town is entirely composed of hard drinking, acerbic English majors.

Fortunately however, his characters are interesting enough that you forgive Klosterman his fancy talk. A novel where the whole town could fit in comfortably at the Algonquin round table runs the distinct risk of becoming precious. Klosterman flirts with the edge a few times, but never topples into the abyss.

That said, there is one literary device he uses to excess. The man is crazy for lists. Lists of this, and lists of that, Klosterman never hesitates to include a list. Much like the atomic bomb, this device is best used sparingly.

All in all, "Downtown Owl" is a good listen, and it kept me changing discs. God willing, the man has more novels like this in him, and not more celebrity-fueled "journalism." Well played Chuck. Please keep it up.

The audio version of Downtown Owl is so addictive that I found myself driving extra miles in my daily commutes just to catch an extra chapter. Whether it's the author's dark comedic voice, the fully developed characterizations of small town denizens Mitch, Horace and Julia, or the memories he stirs of high school life in the mid-1980s, I can't be sure. But I can report that the result is a rare novel that's both truly funny and deeply meaningful.

The plot isn't the thing here. All you need to know is that it chronicles the events in football-obsessed Owl, North Dakota from mid-1983 through early 1984, as witnessed by back-up high school quarterback Mitch, curmudgeonly widower Horace, and history teacher Julia. As we learn the deepest secrets of these and other Owl residents (which include things like unrequited romances, becoming an unwitting mark in a con game, illicit student-teacher relationships, and fantasies of a schoolyard brawl between hulking Grendel and diminuative sociopath Cubby Candy), we also learn a lot about human existence in general.

The meterological climax of the novel, which I can only describe as brilliantly shocking, serves as the perfect resolution of all the wackiness that precedes it. This is an author I will likely read again.

This is one of the most well-written books I've encountered this year. I will definitely be reading more Klosterman books in the future because I find him to be a great storyteller and character creator. In some ways, his writing reminds me of Douglas Coupland's post-modern pop culture tales.

Klosterman has created a fictitious small town in North Dakota named Owl and written about the people who lived there in 1983 and 1984. Like many small towns, there's no cable television, no movie theater, a few local bars, everyone knows everyone's business, and the most important thing is how the high school football team is doing. What do you do in a town like this to keep from going crazy? You just live.

Klosterman tells the story completely in 3rd person, but each chapter follows around a different character: Julia, a young female teacher new to the town; Mitch, a male high school student who is obsessed with getting the two toughest kids in school to fight; and Horace, an old man who has recently lost his wife. Klosterman leads you into each of their heads where you learn their deepest secrets (like how Horace was cheated out of his wife's insurance money). You also get to hear the town gossip (like which student the English professor is sleeping with).

Since I listened to this as a book-on-CD rather than reading it, I found myself trying to find excuses to ride in my car longer so that I could hear the end of the gossipy tales the characters were telling. Each chapter features a different voice actor depending on if the chapter focuses on Julia, Mitch, or Horace.

I especially enjoyed the first long conversation Julia had with the guy at the bar she'd developed a crush on. What made it unique was that Klosterman let us know, line by line, what each character said versus what they meant by what they said. I think he got it spot on for Julia despite being a male who has never been inside a woman's head before.

The ending was an extreme oh-my-god-what-the... type ending that I absolutely didn't expect. Everything leads to this and the reader doesn't know who will live or die.

I read enough that I really appreciate something different every now and then. Klosterman is my new Coupland.

I read the novel Downtown Owl when it first came out and found it to be a quick, entertaining read with surprisingly deep undertones. It's a story of intertwining lives in a small North Dakota town (Owl, North Dakota to be exact) told from several perspectives. What Klosterman does with this story is take what feels like several short stories about nothing and combine them to make one story about a big something. What is that something, though? Mostly, it seems like Klosterman is focusing on how we all perceive the world, what we think of as "normal", and how alike we all really are despite our perceived differences. But maybe that's not what it's about at all. Maybe it's just a bunch of random events that happen to a few fictional people in Owl, North Dakota. Either way, it's incredibly entertaining.

The audiobook takes the story a step further. The choice to employ different narrators for the various characters narrating in the book turns out to be a brilliant decision. This gives the audiobook the life and variance that the book itself effortlessly puts out. All three of the readers are superb with their deliveries and the execution of the story makes this the kind of audiobook that anyone going on a long trip should not hesitate to take with them. I'm usually a bit averse to audiobooks because I'd rather have control of the book and read it myself than have someone else read it to me, but this book all but begs to be read aloud. There is one chapter that doesn't quite fly in audiobook format (you'll know what I mean when you hear it), but the rest is perfect.

The only downside to this audiobook is that when it's over you'll wonder what you're going to listen to next.

As a side note, I'm not a rabid Chuck Klosterman fan and I actually haven't read any of his articles or other books. I just happened to pick this one up and love it.

I listened to this on CD. I always shudder when there is more than one reader. I shudder and quake when the author reads (try and listen to "Marley and Me"); so I worried when I heard that the book would be read by three readers including the author. I do not know which reader the author was. It worked.

The novel is set in the town of Owl, ND, a town of 800. The book, for the most part, is narrated by three characters: "Vanna", a smart high school QB (male despite the nickname), Julia, a new teacher in town and Horace, a local curmudgeon. The reading really worked.

There are books that work well read aloud and those that don't. This one worked very well read aloud. But, we also have to address the book.

The book was very good. It captured the isolated small town from three very different viewpoints. All were effective and insightful. All were at times amusing, at times mundane, at times philosophical - just what you would expect from three disparate characters from a small town. Just as you would expect three different characters, you get what is more valuable - three very different viewpoints of the same small town. To add to the pleasure of the telling are were some very amusing scenes.

One of the best things a novelist can do is to know when to end the book. Just as the book was approaching tedious, Mr. Klosterman ended it with a very dramatic and poignant flair.

I am quite sure I can recommend the book. I am more sure I can recommnd the CD. The telling certainly did not detract and, if I were to read the book, I would assimilate the voices of the readers - the ultimate commendation to readers.

This is a novel about people who are separate, from different generations with different philosophies, who are all united by the common tragedy of eking out an existence in a small north-midwestern town. This is a novel about life in that town, about the gossip, the emotional withdrawal, the inconsequentialities of epic proportions, about what this all amounts to in the end.

Having lived in small town Dakota for most of my life, I have been to Owl, even though it doesn't really exist. Klosterman treats the community he creates and its citizens judiciously and with sensitivity. Where it would be easy to become scathing, Klosterman preserves a neutral tone, asking the reader to make his own judgments. The greatest sin committed in Owl is that of being nothing, of being a blank slate, offering nothing and taking nothing, simply reacting.

Though the novel can seem disjointed at times, Klosterman does a nice job of maintaining the attention of his readers until he has a chance to unify (or does he pull things apart?) things in the end. To borrow an image from the book, it is like snow falling from all directions at once. But, perhaps, this lends to the book's charm.