The Klosterman Files : Downtown Owl (2008)

Downtown Owl is Chuck Klosterman’s first novel. It should technically be easier to review because analyzing fiction is what I do here, but it’s also more difficult to review since it’s so different from what Klosterman usually does. He’s not the one doing the analysis here. I am, which is both really weird and oddly intimidating.

This is not an easy novel to explain since there’s no real story to speak of. There are characters, but they don’t really do anything, which is the entire point of Downtown Owl. People from small towns will instantly “get” it. There’s nothing to do out there. Nowhere to go. So you either get the fuck out or peacefully co-exist until the reaper take you away. Downtown Owl is the story of people clumsily co-existing, so I’m going to talk about them.

Downtown Owl is the best small town novel I’ve ever read because it captures the weird quirks and intricacies of isolated living and it is mostly expressed through its three main protagonists: Mitch Hrlicka, Julia Rabia and Horace Jones, who (by the way) don’t speak to one another for the entire novel.

Mitch Hrlicka

A local teenager who plays football and basketball. He’s not particularly good at it, but it’s what teenage boys do in places like Owl, North Dakota. What makes Mitch particular and endearing is that he’s a smart and imaginative kid who’s never known the world beyond high school. Therefore, he created a mythology that allows him to imbue his life with meaning. When nothing is of interest in your life, things that have no interest suddenly become important.

This is best illustrated in the hypothetical fight between his gigantic classmate Chris Sellers and a twitchy, troubled senior nicknamed Cubby Candy. These guys don’t talk to each other. One is 6’8 and the other (I believe) 5’7. The former is an athlete and the other is a burnout kid. In any other setting, these kids would never interact. But in a place like Owl, their respective potential for a fistfight makes them interesting to their peers.

Speaking of nicknames: every kid around Mitch has one and they’re either based on personality traits, physical traits of idiosyncratic anecdotes that defined their existence in the eyes of others. Zebra, Weezie, Ainge, Drug Man, Curtis-Fritz and Mitch himself being named Vanna, a nickname given by his loated football coach (and sexual predator) John Laidlaw for an obscure reason and like Vanna White, he’s just bearing witness to whatever’s going on.

Mitch Hrlicka was my favorite character of Downtown Owl, because he really cared a lot about things that don’t really matter and therefore makes a small, isolated town like Owl a nicer, more magical place than it ought to be. That’s exactly what Chuck Klosterman is doing with this entire novel, so it makes me sympathetic to Mitch. Helps that I’ve also… you know, literally been in his shoes.

Julia Rabia

A Wisconsin girl who came all the way to Owl on her dad’s advice in order to gain teaching experience and (hopefully) get a teaching gig anywhere she likes after. Klosterman drops several hints that explain who Julia really is: 1) She majored in teaching because she didn’t know what else to do. 2) She followed her dad’s advice because she didn’t know what else to do (which is always a bad thing) and 3) She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.

These are very common traits of people my generation. We’re the first generation who have been told by their parents to “go out in the world and achieve their dreams,” but we don’t know what the fuck it even means. So, Julia ends up doing exactly what every young people do in Wisconsin or everywhere else in the world: she gets out and drinks herself into oblivion. That’s how she meets local football hero and self-loathing bison farmer Vance Druid.

Julia and Vance are fascinating together because they’re living the same exact thing in opposite ways: her existential crisis drove her away from home and his drove him back to it. They were bound to meet, not understand each other and fall in love anyway. Technically, they are the star-crossed lovers of Downtown Owl, but they are way too adorably self-involved to notice it. Their inner self and outer self are totally out of sync with each other.

That’s one again very typical or adult life and quite original in fiction. It rings more true than typical storytelling and I believe it does because of the lack of story. The characters are free to be themselves.

Horace Jones

Unlike the two others, Horace serves somewhat of a specific purpose to Downtown Owl. He has a storyline of his own, but him and his elderly friends are basically keepers of Owl’s history. Of course, Owl is a fictional town so it doesn’t have a history (so to speak) but Klosterman explores more of… the way people think in North Dakota, should I say? There is no real history to Owl and yet there’s a sense of historicity that is explored.

For example, there’s an entire Horace chapter dedicated to the Gordon Kahl shooting, where the old men recall and judge the events that happened. One of them thinks Kahl should’ve paid his taxes. Others disagree. It’s a very important drama in North Dakota history and therefore it’s morally important for people to morally situate themselves in regards to it. It’s both important and not. It shapes social and moral boundaries in Owl.

Because the most important thing in Owl is that nothing ever happens.

Although I liked him a little less than the two others, Horace has his moments. In one chapter, he recalls the couple months following his wife’s death and a crucial encounter he made at her funeral. It really tells more about Horace’s character than anything else in Downtown Owl. Maybe I’ll like (and understand) Horace better in thirty years or so. That’s the thing with growing old: your appreciation of things constantly changes.

To be honest, I liked Downtown Owl quite a lot more than the first time I read it and I remember enjoying it then. Some of you might not “get” it. If you’ve grown up in New York or even… I don’t know: Lancaster, Pennsylvania? It might not hit the spot. But I’ve grown up in a 6,000 people town that’s about 8h away from the first self-respecting city. So I “get” it. I don’t fucking miss it. But I’m happy to live it by proxy via Downtown Owl.

It’s a great novel about people not doing much.