Downtown Owl

A Novel

By: Chuck Klosterman

Narrated by: Phillip Baker Hall, Lily Rabe, Wiley Wiggins, Keith Nobbs, Dennis Boutsikaris

Somewhere in North Dakota, there is a town called Owl that isn't there. Disco is over, but punk never happened. They don't have cable. They don't really have pop culture, unless you count grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard, and then they die. They hate the government and impregnate teenage girls. But that's not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it's perfect.

Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high-school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. She gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer who listens to Goats Head Soup. Horace Jones has resided in Owl for 73 years. He consumes a lot of coffee, thinks about his dead wife, and understands the truth. They all know each other completely, except that they've never met.

Like a colder, Reagan-era version of The Last Picture Show fused with Friday Night Lights, Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing.

Loaded with detail and unified by a (very real) blizzard, it's technically about certain people in a certain place at a certain time...but it's really about a problem. And the problem is this: what does it mean to be a normal person? And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl, what matters more is how you ask the question.

©2008 Chuck Klosterman (P)2008 Simon & Schuster Audio

Eight hours inside the Author’s Head is Challenging

“It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.” One character’s words in a book filled with characters who live and die in a small town where everyone knows everyone and yet is entirely alone.

This is an intriguing snapshot of a brief time in a farming community in the Northern Plains of the US in the 80’s. Each character’s life is perfectly drawn in miniature portraits in words and actions that go absolutely nowhere and have absolutely no meaning. And yet they are fascinating in their emptiness.

Having lived in Cities and Towns of all sizes all over the country, I have met these small town people. Their completely limited, circumscribed lives never cease to amaze me, yet they seem perfectly satisfied with them. It’s a puzzlement, but it focuses the reader on what a life is at its base, with none of the trappings of goals, ambitions, adventures, dramas, thrills or tragedies. Just life: getting up in the morning, doing your life and going to bed.

Klosterman paints these little portraits of these folks and it works, but I’m not sure I want to spend too much time inside his imagination.

The multiple excellent narrators bring the work to life. Good job!

Small town America

I'm a teacher in a small town in Montana. The story is great. Many of the charactors are in every town around here. People drink in these towns and the weather is always cold in the winter. It's -20 outside right now. I enjoyed listening to the three stories and they captured small town America in the northern midwest.

Downtown Owl - goodnight

Chuck Klosterman captures North Dakota like a getaway man asleep behind the wheel. Hands up. Gotcha.

Excellent

A fantastic novel with a very very well done reading by multiple voice and screen actors

Amazing Trip to Nowhere

Any additional comments?

Escape to rural North Dakota where everyone dreams to venture. Follow the lives of an underachieving High School kid, a saucy young female social studies teacher and stoic old widowed farmer. Sounds terrible right? It manages to be quite entertaining. The narrative device (each chapter of the book is broken down by character and delivered in third person limited) lends itself extremely well to audio (there are multiple narrators). The story is all about the bringing the town to life. This is not a plot that races forward. Like the town of Owl, the story trickles ahead with one day bleeding into the next. A trip to nowhere. It sounds terrible. Somehow, it gets 5 stars.

A quirky story well told

What did you love best about Downtown Owl?

I'm in the middle of this book but I feel confident I will enjoy it to the end. The language is so perceptive and the characters so unique. I love getting to know them all.

What about the narrators???s performance did you like?

Usually I'm not a fan of multiple narrators but in this case the narrators brought so much to each chapter, giving each section its own special tone and character.

slow start

it was hard to get into at first. but if you're patient it will pick up

Dark Comedy Story

This is the first book that I have ever read by the author Chuck Klosterman. It is all about the characterizations of the people in this small town. I could have done without one of the key characters, Horace Jones, who was very old and quite boring. I liked the teacher, Julia Rabia, and I wish he could have dropped Horace Jones from the story altogether and given her more pages in the book. I also liked the high school football player, Mitch Hrlicka, and would have liked to have gotten to know him better too.

I wish there could have been more to the book rather than just a snowstorm ending. After going to all of that trouble to get to know the characters, it would have been more satisfying to know how these characters were after the storm.

A Great Listen

This book is constructed in an episodic character-centric manner. The readers are well suited to their characters and I particularly loved Philip Baker Hall...He reminded me of Eli on youtube's eli the accountant channel. Klosterman has some good insights into 80's America...it's too bad that he's about 20 years or so too late, that makes those insights seem a bit facile. Nonetheless, the story is interesting and the narration fun.

Great Fun!!

A hilarious story and commentary on small (really small) town american life. The narrators did an excellent job! The story will make you laugh and maybe cry a little as well.