(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Regular readers might be confused at first over why I found Downtown Owl, the debut novel by famed Generation X memoirist Chuck Klosterman, so incredibly terrible, given how many tropes it shares with CCLaP Publishing's first original book, Ben Tanzer's 2008 Repetition Patterns; after all, both are essentially collections of related stories, both of them oriented more towards character development than plot, both concerning the blue-collar citizens of a small industrial town in the rural US, both heavily informed by the events that happen to these characters in the Reagan-obsessed, pop-culture-happy early 1980s. But see, this gets into something I talk about on a regular basis here, that for every general problem in literature that I rail against over and over at CCLaP, there are always exceptions that I end up loving, and that the differences between the two can oftentimes be surprisingly subtle ones; in this case, for example, even while sharing many of the same surface-level details, the reason I ultimately liked and signed Tanzer's manuscript was that at least he comes to a resolution concerning the situations his characters find themselves in (even if in some stories it's a very quiet one), proof that his lovable losers have grown or at least changed by the end, and thus that there was a reason for us to read the story in the first place. Klosterman, however, provides no such thing for his own 270-page masturbation session, turning in instead essentially a series of hacky Keilloresque go-nowhere character sketches with no natural story arc at all, doubly damning here because of the characters not being very interesting in the first place (a group of old men who sit around a diner each day debating conservative politics; a 23-year-old elementary-school teacher who promptly becomes a miserable alcoholic the moment she arrives at this barely existing North Dakota village; and a dozen more characters who make us think by the end, "Why again am I supposed to care about the fates of any of these mouth-breathers?").

And if this wasn't enough, Klosterman then tacks on one of the most hackneyed, ridiculously arbitrary endings I've ever seen in contemporary literature, literally the meteorological equivalent of saying, "Then a space alien showed up and killed them all with a giant laser ray," the kind of immature mess you'd usually expect from some 15-year-old who's suddenly gotten to the end of their creative-writing homework and doesn't know how to end it. But even with all this, there's still yet another problem with this book even worse than the ones already mentioned, summed up succinctly in the following plea I have for Klosterman if he is to ever one day stumble across this review...ahem...F-CKING ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THE ENDLESS GODD-MN REFERENCES TO EMPTY SH-TTY '80S POP CULTURE, SERIOUSLY YOU F-CKING GEN-X HACK, STOP IT STOP IT ENOUGH F-CK YOU ENOUGH, F-CK YOU F-CK YOU STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP F-CK YOU STOP. The older I get, the more I come to understand just how ashamed of ourselves we all should be for letting postmodernism devolve to the nadir it became by the 1990s, where we as a society seemed to suddenly believe that giant lists of band names and television shows somehow were an adequate substitute for actual insight, for actual storytelling craft; and while I still believe in the power of occasional pop-culture references in literature, especially when it's done to make a bigger metaphorical point (for example, see the Repetition Patterns story "Pac-Man Fever," which turns out to not really be about Pac-Man at all), I absolutely can no longer condone the mere mentioning of post-Vietnam consumerist items just for the sake of mentioning them, for example in the unbelievable 64 mentions in just the first 50 pages of this particular book (and yes, I literally sat and counted, and yes, I did so because I knew you wouldn't believe me otherwise).

Klosterman can be forgiven for the four pop-culture-infused nonfiction memoirs he wrote before this first novel of his, because of them coming out during the years when we were all under this cultural spell (including myself -- I was as guilty of worshipping empty pop culture in the '90s as everyone else); but Downtown Owl just came out in 2008, long past the time that we've discovered late postmodernism to be the elaborate intellectual con-game it actually is. I refuse to have anything more to do with PoMo trainwrecks like these in the Sincerist/Obamian Age we now live in, and everyone involved with this book should be ashamed of themselves, for putting so much money and promotion behind such a badly-erring reflection of our current zeitgeist.

Out of 10: 2.8 ( )

This isn't the greatest novel ever written. It won't change anyone's life nor probably even be someone's favourite ever book. It probably isn't as good as a lot of Klosterman's non-fiction writing even. But, I still enjoyed it and sometimes an enjoyable read is enough.

At times the pop culture references could be over-done and perhaps outside of John Hughes films, people don't talk in quite the way the people do here, but I still found the characters believable and sympathetic despite their flaws. Other criticism of the book has been that there isn't much to sustain it for a whole novel, but actually, I could have spent longer in the company of the residents of Owl. ( )

I can barely give this 1 star--I did like two sections that were classroom humor but the rest was a waste of my time except it did prove to me that I don't want to read any other of his books. The characters are mad, sad, angry, or drunk or various combinations. The worst part was Klosterman's constant inclusion of pop culture. ---I read in other reviews that the readers were so surprised by the ending----I disagree. Since the rest of the book was trite, then so was the ending. It was something a highschool freshman would write when they didn't know how to end something in Creative Writing class.

I admit I was mildly amused the first 30 pages---but the same joke just kept up. Enough already---Chuck just write a short story. This is another case where I kept reading just because I wanted to be able to write a review. ( )

I was surprised to see a novel come out of Chuck Klosterman, I was very excited to see what he could do with it. I enjoyed the story about this very small town but it was a little slow moving for my taste, wonderfully written though.

I do believe his non-fiction works encompass his sarcastic and facetious tones and that is what i enjoy from his works. ( )

I was flipping through Klosterman at Chapters when an employee came up behind me and started gushing about him. The bookseller compared Klosterman to Douglas Coupland—I was sold.

Downtown Owl is a story about three people in a small town in 1983/84 North Dakota. Mitch is a high-school student who grew up there. Horace is a widower who is living out the end of his life discussing espionage in the bars. Julia is a teacher who moved to Owl to get her first job. The narrative is framed by weather: how the unpredictable can break into even the most mundane and scripted lives.

This book is a masterpiece. Klosterman doesn't waste a single line—everything has meaning. I laid in bed for a few nights thinking about the various connections between the main characters and themes. It seemed like the deeper I went, the further the trail led.

Another great element of this book is the way he used different types of lists to convey information. My particular favourite was the list of what all 22 students in Mr. Laidlaw's English class were thinking at 8:45 in the morning. It's as funny (and realistic) as you could imagine.

There's a particular thrill in discovering an author you absolutely love. I've got four earlier books as well as one forthcoming to read before I've caught up with the Klosterman universe.

Long live "small-town quirkiana" (The Boston Globe review from the cover of the Scribner paperback). ( )