Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman

I'm a huge fan of Klosterman's critical work. Fargo Rock City not only got a girl raised on Joan Baez and wheat germ to appreciate heavy metal, it got me to love it, too. Which is why I'm willing to forgive this very confused attempt at a novel, because I know there's some serious talent underneath the painful self-consciousness of Klosterman's adolescent attempt at fiction.

Klosterman's milieu is pop culture, and he finds this new medium very difficult. He uses several different devices to make himself more comfortable, all of which fail by getting in the way of the story. There's the constant name-dropping of 80s cultural references, and the cop-out of using "like an Altman film" as the sole description in some places. The barrage of witticisms is also distracting. In the first three pages alone, we're told that "the sun was burning and falling like the Hindenburg;" "His quadriceps stored enough lactic acid to turn a triceratops into limestone;" and "It would feel like being wrapped in cellophane while hauling bricks in a backpack." Clever, sure, but I want to read about the characters, not the author's wit.

Then, Klosterman does things with style that might work if they weren't so clichéd and if he could actually follow through with them to a reasonable point. But the ostentation of his writerly gimmicks lapses into absurdity by the novel's end. We are meant to understand that the book's action parallels that of George Orwell's 1984, which the Owl high school students are reading in their English classes (the year is 1983). And we follow three characters, each with their own separate chapters and points of view, who are meant to represent Winston, O'Brien, and Julia (Mitch, Horace, and --suprise!-- Julia). The town of Owl is a tiny fishbowl in North Dakota, and the characters can't even find privacy in this novel, since Klosterman reveals everyone's thoughts about everything to the point of disrupting the action. The book trots on nicely for a while, and then Klosterman totally loses it. He experiments with shorter chapters, combined chapters with all three protagonists' points of view (an epic fail), and an ending I'm still trying to work out.

Sorry, Chuck. Don't quit your day job.