Downtown Owl

A Novel

By: Chuck Klosterman

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

Now a major film! New York Times bestselling author and “one of America’s top cultural critics” (Entertainment Weekly) Chuck Klosterman’s debut novel brilliantly captures the charm and dread of small-town life.

Somewhere in rural North Dakota, there is a fictional town called Owl. They don’t have cable. They don’t really have pop culture, but they do have grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. 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. A history teacher, she gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer. Widower and local conversationalist Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. They all know each other completely, except that they’ve never met. But when a deadly blizzard—based on an actual storm that occurred in 1984—hits the area, their lives are derailed in unexpected and powerful ways. An unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where local mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing, Downtown Owl is “a satisfying character study and strikes a perfect balance between the funny and the profound” (Publishers Weekly).©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.