downtown owl

Chuck Klosterman may have taken up fiction, but even in his first novel he hasn't stopped being a critic.

Klosterman's essayist past looms large over Downtown Owl, which makes it all the more impressive that the work stands on its own merit. The story revolves around (and is traded between) three main characters, tied together solely by their residence in Owl, North Dakota, pop. 800. Mitch Hrlicka is a high-school student, third-string quarterback and general malcontent while Julia Rabia is a teacher and maybe-alcoholic. Horace Jones, a 73-year-old who never fulfilled his destiny, rounds out the trio. All three are compelling individuals, believable and amusing, and Klosterman uses them as much to expound on the book's theme-living in a town where everyone knows each other-as he does to advance the plot.

What plot there is, anyway. Mitch, Julia and Horace mainly just exist, but their daily lives are quirky, reflective and hilarious enough to keep the reader entertained. Klosterman's decision to break the novel into three simultaneous stories is distracting, but it does succeed in building intimate relationships between the reader and each character. Similarly, as a result of his frequent tendency to use them as instruments of critique-alternatively disconcerting and advantageous due to his talent for breaking down culture-his prose spends as much time inside the characters' heads as it does describing their actions. Klosterman strives to show that everyone does as much thinking as he does, and it provides for some neurotic, authentic and damn funny characters.

The writing itself is one of Owl's bigger surprises. At times it is overenthusiastic, heavily laden with parentheticals and reaching metaphors, but for the most part the sentences are clean and punchy. Klosterman's powers of description are adequate, and the fact that he's able to interweave so much introspection while leaving the prose readable, is praiseworthy. The book flows smoothly, and unlike many first-time novelists, he rarely tries to overstep his abilities.

Owl is an insightful and fun debut, showing that even with the new medium, Klosterman is able to do what he does best.