MAN CAVE: I gave fiction another shot

This weekend I finished two works of fiction - Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl and Carson Mell's Saguaro

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MAN CAVE: I gave fiction another shot

POSTED: Monday, August 1, 2011, 2:00 PM

Filed Under: Man Cave

I'm not much of a fiction reader. When I read, it's usually essays on whatever topic I'm interested in at the moment. I usually prefer my fiction in motion picture form (a bad habit, for sure, but one probably related to adult ADHD). But one of my favorite non-fiction writers, Chuck Klosterman has a work of fiction out called Downtown Owl. I started reading it about three weeks ago, and, after finishing it this weekend, I'm so glad I did.

What I missed about Klosterman's essays — namely, him nerding out at great length about topics I'm already familiar with — was alleviated about half-way in. After the not-so-painful process of getting lectured about Owl (a small fictional town in North Dakota) and the three unconnected main characters, I was now an expert on these people. So reading Klosterman's usual shuffling of their minutia was just as satisfying as it would have been on some famous real-life filmmaker or athlete.

Downtown Owl's three main characters are comprised of a third-string highschool quarterback, a young female teacher from the big city trying to adjust to a remote town of 800, and an old-head widower who's lived there his entire life. The central push of the narrative: In a town this small, everybody knows everybody's name (or nickname, as it were) and everybody knows everybody's business. Gossip is the main way for people to relate to each other; there are some parallels made to 1984 and the thought police. Yet people don't really get to know each other so there's a sense of isolation despite the town being one big dysfunctional family.

The second novel I finished this weekend is a short bugger by Carson Mell called Saguaro. To be perfectly honest, I borrowed Saguaro from a friend and since it's written in the style of a memoir by a musician, I didn't realize it was fictional until after I was finished (I figured the protagonist Bobby Bird was significantly less famous than the John Lennons and Bob Dylans he mentions running into during the '60s). The fake memoir sucks you right in with extremely humorous styled prose about Bobby Bird's childhood. Mell's consistent voice takes you through Bird's occasionally extreme but contextually believable life as a folk rocker, and offers a Keroakian realness to his relationships and desires, regardless of how unimpressive they can be.

Maybe this is a turning point for me. When I was 12 I read every Star Wars novel available and enjoyed all sorts of untrue stories like The Hatchet and The Hardy Boys. I don't know what about adulthood got me away from the thought-movie goodness of the novel but perhaps I may have to start squeezing some room on my man cave bookshelf for the blatantly fabricated narrative.

(ryan.carey@citypaper.net)

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