Downtown Owl Makes the Unremarkable Remarkable

Even if you could find Owl, North Dakota on a map, you probably wouldn’t stop there. It’s just like any other Nothingtown in 1980’s America: no cable. No culture. No nothing. Just boredom, and a whole lot of it. No one moves away and hardly anyone moves in. With a population of only 800, everyone knows what everyone else is doing. All the time. It’s very Big Brother/George Orwell (ironically, the majority of the book takes place in 1984).

Living in this bleak town are several unremarkable characters, living quiet and indistinct lives. Julia Rabia, a schoolteacher who recently moved to downtown Owl, finds herself “more depressed than she had ever been in her entire twenty three year existence,” despite the instant celebrity status that comes with being a beautiful stranger in a small town. Mitch Hrlicka plays high school football and is mainly concerned with how weird he is (or isn’t) and whether he is going to have to fight Chris Sellars. Horace is seventy-three, and thinks a lot about Alma, his wife who passed away of a disease unknown to him.

There are no fireworks in Downtown Owl. Mitch does not become a star NFL quarterback. There is no prince on a white horse to come and rescue Julia. Horace continues to frequent the same coffee shop day in and day out. Klosterman offers an unromanticized looks at small town life. He disregards convention to give readers a look at what it’s like to be a plain person leading a plain life in a plain town. The end result is a raw, honest look into what could be the life of anyone who grew up in rural America.

You would expect the pace of a book about a “down” town to move as lazily as the town itself. However, the plot chugs along nicely, as you find yourself getting more and more wrapped up in the lives of Owl’s citizens. Everything seems complacent, if not perfect, when disaster strikes out of nowhere. Readers will find themselves caught as off guard and unprepared for the story’s climax as the characters are for the blizzard that strands them. In the end, you’ll be dazed, rereading the last few chapters over and over to make sure you understood correctly.

Downtown Owl was only released last year, and is the first novel by Klosterman, a Minnesota newspaper columnist. But you would never know it, because it has a “modern classic” feel to it that is reminiscent of Kerouac or Salinger. Klosterman has accomplished something few people could ever do: he has captured the essence of normality, and recreated it between the covers of his book. In doing so, he has created a novel that is not only timeless, but a true joy to read, too.

--Jenn C