Everday Masterpieces

I just finished the brilliant and concise novel by Stewart O'Nan "Last Night at the Lobster." This beautiful little book is like a small heartbreak, one that leaves you incapacitated but from which you know you will recover. It's a blues song in prose, but laced with hope.




O'Nan, though named by Granta (the literary magazine) as one of the 20 Best American Writers Under Forty, remains little known. His one true bestseller is the book he co-wrote with Stephen King, "Faithful," about the Red Sox World Series-winning season (the one that ended the fabled Curse of the Bambino). It is, in a way, a sad estimation of O'Nan's incredible talent that this is likely his only book to reach a massive audience, especially considering that, in the future, it is likely to be his least remembered work (it will likely be remembered only by King fans, and even then only as an oddity).

The truth is that O'Nan is a major talent (for once, Granta got it right). And "Last Night at the Lobster" is no exception.

O'Nan is that rare writer--rare not because it requires more talent, but simply because it requires a very specific sensibility--who grounds his stories entirely in everyday events. His people are ordinary people. Their lives are ordinary lives. Nothing particularly stupendous or exemplary occurs. And yet out of the simplest materials O'Nan carves fiction that stirs something inside you, gut-checks you out of your complacency, sometimes breaks you.




His last novel "Songs for the Missing" is a fine example. It is a story about the disappearance of a teenage girl and how her family handles and copes with her disappearance. In the hands of different writers this story would take on varied dimensions. For Denis Lehane, this would be a crime novel ("Moonlight Mile"). For Joyce Carol Oates, it would be a tale of family disintegration and societal obsession ("My Sister, My Love").

But O'Nan does not take it in either grand direction. He simply details how we cope, or fail to cope, how we experience devastation, how ordinary lives are shattered by the rather ordinary tawdriness of living in America.

The truth is that O'Nan's novels should be boring. His approach should put you to sleep. Because he does nothing fancy. He refuses to stand out. And yet, instead of boredom one finds themselves enthralled, and perhaps this is why he has been compared to the great Russian short story master, Anton Chekhov. The comparison is apt, for they both make much out of little.

The only novel of O'Nan's that, on the surface, breaks the pattern, is his wonderful novella "The Night Country." It is a ghost story, but unlike any ghost story you've ever read. The ghosts are a group of teenagers who died in a car wreck last fall, and now they have returned come Halloween night.




But, in typical O'Nan fashion, these ghosts are, sadly but not disappointingly, ordinary. Sadly, because they are ghosts damnit, and they should be by their very nature different from the rest of us, but they're not. They are simply teenagers, hardly changed by the fact that they are dead. They narrate parts of the story, as they travel about town during Halloween night, following old friends, following old teachers, following the man who was at fault in the accident that killed them all.

It is a beautifully written piece that manages to haunt you long after it is over, a feat all the more impressive given that O'Nan's ghost do no "haunting."

Another impressive work is the major novel "Wish You Were Here." It is the story of a far-flung family coming together for one last vacation at their summer home on the lake. The family has slowly pulled apart over the years, but not necessarily to the breaking point. Rather, the myriad of little battles have merely left their scars, and everyone has spent time in the trenches.

O'Nan writes a nearly flawless examination of the way families work, of the intricacies of loyalty and betrayal, of the beauty and the heartbreak of marriage, of the bitterness of failure and the sometimes equally bitter quality of success. His prose is perfectly on-pitch, smoothly revealing the lives of young children, teenagers, middle-aged parents and the elderly, all believable, all engrossing.




Not many writers delve into their characters' lives in this way, showing not only joy, not only pain, but the way in which both these elements are held so continuously in tandem. O'Nan writes with a brutal honesty that deserves more attention, for it is only with this kind of emotional and intellectual honesty that we can, both as individuals and as a nation, hope to face the perils of our everyday lives. For they are perilous, and how we spend our days, how we think our daily thoughts, how we live and breathe moment to moment, these little bits add up and become our lives.

"Last Night at the Lobster" is a fine piece of writing. Give it a shot. It's a short read, an afternoon's attempt, really, at just under 150 pages.

You won't regret it.