Downtown Owl: A Novel
by Chuck Klosterman

In the beginning, we are all Renaissance Men. We make paintings on Tuesdays, tell stories on Fridays, and dabble with music on the weekend. Soon, though, the song of Specialization (performed with the harmony of Employment) begins its enchantment, and interests fall by the wayside.

It is this song that leads many aspiring writers to journalism, one of the few options promising both the ability to write and to receive a biweekly paycheck for it. Many, however, are unhappy settling here, and dream of a writing world without daily deadlines, city councilmen, or co-workers. They want to make the Jump, to strike a blow into Specialization’s gut and reclaim a sense of diverse interests.

Yet this jump is not easy. Just ask William F. Buckley, the great mind behind God and Man at Yale, whose fiction veers on a pulpy precipice just above a Robert Ludlum Bourne thriller. Even those who have ostensibly succeeded — George Orwell and Hunter S. Thompson come to mind — really have not; the “fiction” designation is but a veneer covering the real subject, whether it is a political tract (as in Orwell’s 1984) or a memoir (as Thompson’s Rum Dairy).

This trail of trial has not scared Chuck Klosterman away. Perhaps it is the hubris of a successful young writer. At the tender age of 36, he has managed to not only rise to preeminence in his original coverage of music (at Spin Magazine), but has also risen meteorically in the sports world, writing for ESPN. With these accomplishments alone, he has become the de facto poet laureate of his home state of North Dakota. Or perhaps it is boredom, an exhaustion with a seemingly conquered field. Once you’ve covered Gilbert Arenas, philosophical quandaries, and Billy Joel in the same collection of essays, the question, “Now what?” becomes much more tangible.

Whatever the reason, this first fictional foray does not start well. Even before the page numbers begin, we read the following disclaimer on the dedication: “This story is a non-autobiographical work of fiction.” For the author of Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, this notice seems unnecessarily constricting; as it were, it is actually overcompensating.

The story takes place in Owl, North Dakota, a town with a population “around eight hundred. Maybe eight fifty.” Klosterman, of course, grew up in Wyndmere, North Dakota, a town with a population of 533. We follow the paths of three, largely unrelated characters — Mitch, a high-school football player; Julia, a high-school teacher who comes from out-of-town; and Horace, the seventy-three year-old townie.

In spite of these widely diverse perspectives, it is the same voice — Klosterman’s — that keeps coming to the surface. Mitch, who never listens to rock music and is generally a slacker, observes that, “Society is so confused . . . . Everyone wanted to become the person they were already pretending to be.” Heavy stuff for a third-string quarterback in the rural North. When describing the thoughts of local football hero Vance Druid: “My vanity conflicts me. My problems are clichéd and predictable.” Then, there are the culture references, peppered throughout the book as are his essays. Most obnoxious of these references, however, are those that are completely divorced from Owl. For instance, “There were multiple conversations happening at the same time; it was like an Altman film, although nobody inside the car had ever seen an Altman film.” Later, we get, “Inside her skull, words and sentences sounded like side three of Metal Machine Music, an album she had never heard of.” By the end, we can’t tell who is the subject — Klosterman or the characters. It is, to use Klosterman’s vernacular, like an Aphex Twin cover.

So it is natural that it is the implicit narration, where the author is indubitably the voice speaking, that the writing really resonates. Without the baggage of character development and inner thoughts, Klosterman’s inimitable prose is allowed to flourish. This, perhaps, is why his brief sketches of minor townies resonate more than the main characters. Take, for example, Rebecca Grooba:

There were twenty-two juniors in the room. Twenty-one of them had never even seen the cover of Moby-Dick, so they remained silent out of necessity. The twenty-second junior, Rebecca Grooba, had read Moby-Dick in sixth grade. She remained silent by choice, just as she had (and just as she would) for the duration of every class she ever took (or would take) during her thirteen years inside the rectangular classrooms of Owl public school. During that thirteen-year span, Revecca Grooba would never score less than 94 on any scholastic examination, except for one 67 on an extra-credit trigonometry test that no one else was able to attempt . . . . She understood how isotopes operated before she knew what isotopes were. She could count cards and memorize Social Security numbers. As an eighth grader, she read Finnegans Wake over Christmas vacation and scrawled the digits “1132″ on her Earth Science notebook. No one asked why she did this. Rebecca Grooba was a genius; everyone in Owl knew it, but hardly anyone cared. She was so shy that she wasn’t even unpopular. Over time, her wordless brilliance became routine, and then it became boring. People quit noticing.

In 1988, Rebecca Grooba would become a registered nurse.

In those last nine words, Klosterman captures so much of the snow-dusted spirit of the rural North, a sentiment expressed in a much different light when discussing the mascot controversy of the 1960s: “But — nonetheless, and more importantly — there has not been any major community controversy since the late sixties. Things have been perfect ever since, if by ‘perfect’ you mean ‘exactly the same.’”

It is in these passages and those like them that Klosterman comes close to something real, to sociology told with a storyteller’s gift. It is these moments, these journalistic moments, where insight is reached. Yet by forcing the work to be fiction, Klosterman has muddled the damn thing. Instead of letting his voice flourish, and being forthright about his home state, he has dabbled in using fiction as a veil, with marionettes for characters. We can only hope that his next work is classified in the “non-fiction” section.