Tag Archives: author

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

In Stewart O’Nan’s The Odds, the Drink is Marriage on Niagara’s Rocks

Stewart O’Nan reads from The Odds: A Love Story at the Seattle Public Downtown Library at 7 p.m.

Now, well into middle age, he’d changed shockingly little. If, as he liked to think, his greatest strength was a patient, indomitable hope, his one great shortcoming was a refusal to to accept and therefore have any shot at changing his fate, even when the inevitable was clear to him.

I don’t want to quote too much from The Odds, by Stewart O’Nan, because it’s a small book, about 180 pages, and his style isn’t the pyrotechnic kind that, in a paragraph, leaves you wide-eyed. I’d just end up giving things away. The Los Angeles Times called him “the spokesperson of the regular person,” and you can see what they were getting at, but O’Nan’s gift is to somehow, through building up the stream of life’s matters of fact, surmount them.

Here, a 50-something couple who have smashed up bankrupt in their marriage and mortgage, are embarked on a last, prodigal trip to Niagara Falls, where Art has the insane notion of going double or nothing, so to speak. His wife Marion is along for the ride, but regretfully, as this undersold recap illustrates: “Her entire life had not been a ruin. There were seasons she’d keep, years with the children, days and hours with Art, and, yes, despite the miserable end, with Karen.”

Though it begins with them on a bus, swapping the terrible, unadorned small talk of people who have lost the ability to surprise each other, O’Nan is setting out, let’s say, on a slippery wire across the falls, like a literary Philippe Petit. Small steps, small steps, and suddenly you’re in the middle, a torrent beneath you. Everything must be perfectly weighted: Art’s doggedness, Marion’s habitual light rancor and dodges, the flashbacks to where the money went, the “keeping up appearances” with Facebook boasting about seeing Heart, live.

In summary form, this has every appearance of being a book about something: “our time,” perhaps, the pissed-away end of the American Dream, but  O’Nan makes no great effort to paint Art and Marion as typical in grander ways–he insists on their uniqueness just in living as they do, in having lived as they do. They come to feel like people you might have run into on a bus, spoken with a bit to pass the time. Balanced against their casino scheme, O’Nan places the chance that they have already gotten lucky–as lucky as people get in love.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Joshua Mohr’s Damascus and Keeping on the Sordid Side of Life

Novelist Joshua Mohr talks with novelist Jonathan Evison at the University Book Store, on November 17, at 7 p.m.

Joshua Mohr

Joshua Mohr is sort of a handful. His debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, has the title of a poetry chapbook, and the soul of one as well, though on the spectrum it’s more Bukowski than Wordsworth, as the the blurb from O, The Oprah Magazine, clarifies.

It’s hugely ambitious, in that Mohr wants to tell the story from the point of view of someone with dissociative identity disorder, and you probably do not want to listen to this person tell you about what exactly happened in their childhood. It’s against your better judgment that you keep turning pages, even as “Rhonda” makes staggeringly poor life choices.

Mohr writes out the sordid heart of San Francisco–specifically, the Mission District–and if you’ve spent much time by the Bay, you’ll recognize that unsettling warm-sewer-whiff-in-the-street urbanity that permeates his books. It’s a radical empathy with, or even in preference for, the stinky side of life that, mostly unseen, underlies everything.

In Damascus, Mohr returns you to a down-and-outer Mission bar with the shards of twenty mirrors glued to its painted-black ceiling, “transforming Damascus into a planetarium for drunkards: dejected men and women stargazing from barstools.” In the first two pages you meet Owen, the bar’s owner, who has a Hitler-‘stache birthmark beneath his nose; Shambles, the patron saint of handjobs; and No Eyebrows, a middle-aged man dying of cancer and on the run from responsibility of any kind.

So far, so San Francisco. You simply have to make your peace with the fact that San Francisco’s human flotsam and jetsam (Rhonda makes a cameo appearance) is of a more captivating sort than many places–and with Mohr’s penchant for mixing ripped-from-the-journal reportage with prose poetry:

And other things were happening in the world, of course. Because there always are. There has to be. A couple who’d tried to conceive a child for years finally succeeded. A son estranged from his mother for almost twenty years picked up the phone and called and apologized for his role in their corrupted history. A seventeen-year-old girl’s cancer when into remission. Separated spouses decided to keep struggling through their knot of marital woes. A sunflower bloomed in Fargo, North Dakota. It rained in Orlando, Florida.

The book is bipolar, in that partly it tracks the unlikely, hermetic romance between no-strings Shambles and no-hope No Eyebrows, and partly it observes how the Iraq War intrudes into the  Mission District of 2003–a performance art installation meant to honor dead soldiers (but featuring dead fish) attracts a more muscular critique than anticipated.

“Screw the critics,” Revv said, pushing the beers across the bar to them, then coming back around and planting himself. “You made real deal art so don’t worry whether any academic dimwits get it or not. Let them snicker at cartoons in The New Yorker. The joke’s on them.”

It’s not the academic dimwits who object, though, but returned-from-Iraq soldiers, hypersensitive to civilian slights to their honor. It doesn’t seem like it can end well, yet, again, you keep turning pages.

Mohr’s writing is appealing because it is raw and unfiltered, overheard on the street or from the next bar stool, but it can also seem merely unvarnished, with its joints showing. I’m of two minds about that artlessness, but there’s no denying the effect, that it conjures a reality that stains you with the underarm sweat of the Mission, and the naivete of 2003, when no one would have believed eight more years of war were in store.