Customer Reviews

Everyday People

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With compassion as his bellwether and acute observance as his compass Stewart O'Nan offers an intense story of people thwarted by poverty and racial prejudice.

Set in East Liberty, a wasted Pittsburgh community, the novel's action is compressed to one week in the lives of the Tolbert family. An 18-year-old son, Chris, has been paralyzed by a fall from a freeway overpass. This graffiti writing escapade took the life of his best friend.

His older brother, who found religion while in prison, is attempting to save another from the ravages of urban violence. While their father, Harold, is drawn to a homosexual relationship with a younger man.

Many of their neighbors stoically bear the vicissitudes wrought simply by their birth while longing for a better life.

Mr. O'Nan's ear for street patois is true, bringing authenticity to his spare yet compelling dialogue. As evidenced in his latest work, this author remains a master of minimalist prose blessed with maximum talent.

Sometimes I wonder why I keep reading this guy's books, since they are so relentlessly grim (it's no doubt not a coincidence that he's dressed all in black in the cover photo). At first, it looks like this one will be an exception, with the horrible events in the past rather than in the future. No such luck. And just when it looks like things are quietly winding down, the last word in the book is a kick in the stomach (and stands in for a chapter which I had been expecting, and dreading). Of course, O'Nan's skill in creating characters makes up for a lot of grimness (though it would be nice to read a slightly more cheerful book by him). A good deal of his skill is in what he let's us fill in for ourselves, rather than describing himself (what becomes of Sister Marita, for example). Highly recommended, but read it on a sunny day!

Stewart O'Nan is an author who resolutely defies categorization. His works include the real-life horrors of "The Speed Queen" and "A Prayer for the Dying." But he also holds the mundane everyday up to light when he examines the bonds and responsibilities of family in "A World Away" and in this most recent work, "Everyday People."

"Everyday People" is set in O'Nan's home town of Pittsburgh, a city defined by its close-knit neighborhoods. East Liberty is a predominantly black neighborhood. Once a thriving working-class community, a place of help and hope, it has been socially decimated by gangs and physically split by the construction of an express busway that effectively cuts it off from the rest of the city.

The novel is built of chapters that read like sharply defined, independent but interrelated short stories. Each holds fully developed characters, conflict and a finality of ending. Taken together, though, they build in power as they show the families, friends and lovers bound together in a tightly drawn picture of community.

These are gritty stories, well removed from worlds of polished comfort. The characters most central to the saga are those of the Tolbert family, each of whom is challenged by a different kind of desperation. Chris, 18, is a young man whose hopes were severed as completely as his spinal cord after a freak accident kills his best friend and confines him to a wheelchair. The twin comforts of pain pills and marijuana ease some of his physical symptoms, but he has to either uncover the inner resources to continue living or accept that he's effectively found himself in a life sentence without hope of parole.

Chris' brother, Eugene, has recently returned home after a jail term; he's learned his lesson, found the Lord and is looking to help the younger men in his neighborhood avoid his pitfalls. His efforts, though, are not enough to save a man who was once his best friend. Their father, Harold, recently has admitted to himself he's a homosexual, though it's not a secret he's shared with his family. He finds himself questioning whether he's now tied to them by responsibility or love - if it hadn't been for Chris' accident, he might well have been out of the house and living a different life with his boyfriend. Jackie doesn't understand why her marriage has fallen apart, but she's held together by the certain knowledge that "tragedies would come and go, and only faith stayed the same."

"Everyday People" is a book immersed in the rich complexity of character. In the most casual way, it explores the daily choices, large and small, deliberate or casual, that can forever change a life. It contrasts the choices offered by the paths of hope and despair. It investigates the pull and the obligations of love in all its wonderful, often difficult and sometimes ugly guises.

Stewart O'Nan, a young white man, sets for himself a most ambitious task in his 2001 novel Everyday People: a contemporary story set in the inner city, with mostly or entirely black characters, and dialogue in black dialect. As for setting, characters, and language, he succeeds. Where O'Nan came up a bit short was with plot. In large measure, O'Nan follows Chris ("Crest") Tolbert and his family during one week before the opening of a new expressway which will effectively cut the Tolbert's neighborhood from the rest of the city. Before the novel began, Crest was rendered a paraplegic when he fell of the half-completed parkway in an accident which also killed his best friend. How Crest, his family, his girlfriend (and now mother of his son), and others deal with this tragedy is a very promising beginning. O'Nan's failure, I believe, was in attempting to make his story too true to life, with several minor plot lines or stories that get started and remain unresolved - and unaddressed - by the book's final pages. Although this is how life often works, as a reader I found myself at the end asking "what about this?," and "what happened to him?" O'Nan overall seems a very gifted writer, and his characters are outstandingly drawn. Everyday People is certainly well worth reading for these reasons. However, in my judgment, it could have been better.

I can understand why this book may be compelling to those who are not: a)from Pittsburgh, b)looking for a intricately crafted story line, and most importantly c)African American. As the author notes near the end, maybe for a split second he can see what I see, but unfortunately, he fails to communicate the rich texture of the Black experience even in as wholly depressing environment as he attempts to create.

This book turned out to be a group of short stories centered on the daily stresses and encumbrances encountered by the Tolbert family and other community denizens in what he perceives to be life in Black urban America. I commend him on his ability to convey emotional structure but he fails to provide adequate imagery to give the reader a sense of the physical. I have a better mental picture of Tony's ice cream truck than any of the so-called African-American members of this community.

Within the Black community, descriptives that distinguish one person from another by complexion or physical features are commonplace. We only know the ethnicity of his characters by the authors' avowals and his inconsistent attempts to capture the vernacular which, by the way is not enhanced by any inclusions of "Pittsburghese." His patois of the street strikes me like someone without language skills attempting to emulate an upper crust British accent.

I was also disappointed in his failure to address the impact of ethnicity in relation Harold's homosexuality. Acceptance of that lifestyle has implications in the community - across the board and most particularly in the Black church- that Mr. O'Nan avoids entirely.

In essence, Mr. O'Nan writes of a sense of frustration, powerlessness and to an extent, resignation that is not predominant in East Liberty. It appears to be he who is incapable of seeing beyond the walls of the busway.

This is a competent effort, one that merits attention as a study of the human condition, however the emphasis on the African American community is a misguided one for this writer. I would suggest "Drop" by Matt Johnson or "White Boy Shuffle" by Paul Beatty, as two efforts more successfully conveying the subleties of the urban experience.

reading through the O'Nan oeuvre, this isn't my favorite, but it's brilliant. the ending left me breathless and sad. one review here said the ending was pat. ridiculous. this book, this writer, is risky. O'Nan is pathological in his disdain for writing a book that is remotely like anything else he's written, each one sui generis. for a white young-ish guy to attempt this inside look at a black community, and to make it mostly compelling, is a feat. i think one of the chapters could've been left out, Dre's, but its inclusion didn't hurt the portrait painted, just cluttered it a little. but you know what? i trust O'Nan. i give O'Nan carte blanche. he's gonna have to really blow it to frustrate me. as relatively (vis a vis Prayer for the Dying, Speed Queen, Night Country, Names of the Dead) unplotted and as character driven and slice-of-life as this was (not to say that such books can't be wonderful), he did not blow it here. in fact, he shone, brightly, yet again. and that light shines on, edifies The Struggle. this story is pre-Obama. one cannot help but wonder what those characters would think now. will Obama one day go up on the wall? will you notice him in the blur as you speed by?

With his latest novel, ''Everyday People,'' Stewart O' Nan invents and enters the deprived African-American Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) neighborhood of East Liberty in the fall of 1998. At this time the neighborhood is about to be cut off from the rest of the city by the opening of a new expressway for buses. The town has always been victim to poverty and gang violence; during this one week, their patience will be tested more than usual.
At the center of the novel is the Tolbert family. Chris, also known as Crest, a seventeen-year-old boy who is the youngest in the Tolbert family, has just returned from the hospital in a wheelchair, coming out of a tragic accident that occurred on that very expressway which left him paralyzed from the waist down. That accident happened to take the life of his best friend, Bean. His older brother, Eugene, has just returned from jail and found Jesus as a born-again Christian. Harold, the boys' kind and loving father, is in love with a younger man (Andre) but leaves him, rationalizing that his boys need him more. Harold's wife, Jackie, senses that something is not right (though she believes his lover to be a younger woman), and is furious because the man she has always trusted has become the kind of man she had sworn she would never tolerate. Vanessa, the teenage mother of Crest's son, Rashaan, is trying to make more of her life by trying to balance her responsibility as a mother with the stress of waiting tables, and takes an adult education class in African-American literature at night school and realizes that she wants to learn more, which hopefully, will motivate her to obtain a college degree. Miss Fisk, is an elderly woman who looks after Rashaan, the way she used to look after Bean. Besides this one family, there are people dying, children involved with gangs, and many others being robbed all around.
Stewart O' Nan may be doubted because he is a white author who writes about an underprivileged African-American community and may not fully understand the experiences of those who actually live there. He captures the readers' attention with his vivid descriptions and interesting story plot. He incorporates the everyday lives that continue to go on in urban America. Many people are blind to see the reality of our world but this novel helps them listen to the voices of these characters, and let them know that they are everyday people, rather than gangsters, thieves, prostitutes or even drug addicts. Clearly the author wants the reader to realize how one crime can affect a whole community over a period of time. Honestly, I was a little disappointed because I'd rather of spent more time inside the head of Crest. He seemed like a good levelheaded boy who was influenced a lot by his surroundings. I would have loved to know all of his thoughts about what was going on in his community for that week, especially what he went through that will now change his life forever. It seemed like the underlying message of the story was to try and do good in life by staying on track and especially in school with an education because that is the key to a successful future, like Vanessa is trying to achieve.

With his latest novel, ''Everyday People,'' Stewart O' Nan invents and enters the deprived African-American Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) neighborhood of East Liberty in the fall of 1998. At this time the neighborhood is about to be cut off from the rest of the city by the opening of a new expressway for buses. The town has always been victim to poverty and gang violence; during this one week, their patience will be tested more than usual.
At the center of the novel is the Tolbert family. Chris, also known as Crest, a seventeen-year-old boy who is the youngest in the Tolbert family, has just returned from the hospital in a wheelchair, coming out of a tragic accident that occurred on that very expressway which left him paralyzed from the waist down. That accident happened to take the life of his best friend, Bean. His older brother, Eugene, has just returned from jail and found Jesus as a born-again Christian. Harold, the boys' kind and loving father, is in love with a younger man (Andre) but leaves him, rationalizing that his boys need him more. Harold's wife, Jackie, senses that something is not right (though she believes his lover to be a younger woman), and is furious because the man she has always trusted has become the kind of man she had sworn she would never tolerate. Vanessa, the teenage mother of Crest's son, Rashaan, is trying to make more of her life by trying to balance her responsibility as a mother with the stress of waiting tables, and takes an adult education class in African-American literature at night school and realizes that she wants to learn more, which hopefully, will motivate her to obtain a college degree. Miss Fisk, is an elderly woman who looks after Rashaan, the way she used to look after Bean. Besides this one family, there are people dying, children involved with gangs, and many others being robbed all around.
Stewart O' Nan may be doubted because he is a white author who writes about an underprivileged African-American community and may not fully understand the experiences of those who actually live there. He captures the readers' attention with his vivid descriptions and interesting story plot. He incorporates the everyday lives that continue to go on in urban America. Many people are blind to see the reality of our world but this novel helps them listen to the voices of these characters, and let them know that they are everyday people, rather than gangsters, thieves, prostitutes or even drug addicts. Clearly the author wants the reader to realize how one crime can affect a whole community over a period of time. Honestly, I was a little disappointed because I'd rather of spent more time inside the head of Crest. He seemed like a good levelheaded boy who was influenced a lot by his surroundings. I would have loved to know all of his thoughts about what was going on in his community for that week, especially what he went through that will now change his life forever. It seemed like the underlying message of the story was to try and do good in life by staying on track and especially in school with an education because that is the key to a successful future, like Vanessa is trying to achieve.