Everyday People

Stewart O'Nan is a favorite author, and this series of inter-connected stories highlights what I love about him - his empathy for the common man and his ability to ennoble even the most modest of characters by drawing attention to their humanity and making the reader feel something genuine for them. Here, he gives us East Liberty, a working class black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, peopled by factory workers, gang members, retirees, brothers, parents, children, and friends. We get many different stories from these "everyday people," stories in which they struggle to find meaning, reason, dignity, and hope. It's a wonderfully written volume, and kudos to O'Nan, who is white, for attempting to tell these stories; I wasn't sure how I felt show more about that at first - it seemed almost presumptuous of him since he can't ever know what these lives are truly like - but he has such obvious care and regard for his characters that I think it worked well. Highly recommended!

4.5 stars

At the end, the narrator imagines a large graffiti mural along the wall of the new busway that is separating the neighborhood from the rest of the city - a mural peopled by heroes, some known and others not - and imagines the riders on the buses, commuters coming in from the suburbs:

"Not one out of a thousand turns sideways in their seat to pick out the few celebrities among the dead: Alex Haley - and there, lookit, it's Charlie Parker. None of them can read the names of the other ones, not as famous, in fact almost totally unknown, yet still remembered, honored like the rest. They don't know East Liberty, so the best they could come up with, even if they cared, would be ill-informed stories, pat tragedies in blackface. Maybe some of them - riding in, going home in the rain - see the flash of color flying by outside the window and marvel at the artwork, wonder what's being celebrated here. Maybe for a split second they see what you see, the dreams of a people that will not be denied, the sacrifices made in the name of progress, but that's just easy public-TV jive. No one wants to go beyond their own feel-good bullshit. No one wants to know what it really means." show less

Having recently read O'Nan's EMILY ALONE on the recommendation of a friend, I decided to check out other of his novels.
Other than being set in Pittsburgh, this novel only has one thing in common with EMILY ALONE: both are excellent. EMILY was told solely from the perspective of the heroine (a white widow of some means), but this one is told from the viewpoints of over a dozen residents of an African American community. It's a gripping tale, and as it unfolds we learn much about each of them.

Fabulous author. His writing was so authentic, compelling, engrossing. O'Nan seems totally deserving of the numerous awards and praise he has received from the literary community which started with his first book. I look forward to reading more of his work.