As Birdy drives over to the beach, she shoves the last of the chewing gum into her mouth. As the sweet taste spreads, everything seems strange to her for a moment. The huge rocks and the withered rhododendrons left and right of the street, the broken lobster traps, the discarded buoys lying rusting in the front yards. Only when she sees the sea as a dark line on top of the hill does she relax and look forward to Myles. Forgets the nervousness, the job at the sandwich shop, the secrecy, his girlfriend for a while. But the inner unrest remains. “No turning point” says a sign in front of the locked holiday homes. And you already know at this point that the story will not end well.
The American writer Stewart O’Nan has always had a soft spot for those areas of society that are centered around the world of pubs and supermarkets. His characters often live in suburbs or industrial zones and experience how the social fault lines become ever deeper and not only destroy their childhood spheres, but entire spaces of memory. In his 2007 novel Last Night, for example, he took a typical diner on the last day before the shutdown and turned it into an image of what has been dubbed the American working-class dream. Again and again in his books he links the stories told with historical investigations. At the same time, he makes it clear how fragile and contradictory his characters’ perception of the world is and how much the memory clings to sensually perceptible details.
His new novel is set again in the Hartford, Connecticut area, where he lived for a long time. This time, to be more precise, at the interface to Rhode Island, with the small towns of Westerly and Ashaway, where the coast and its beach houses are not far away, but where the consequences of the bank crash are particularly evident. It’s autumn 2009 and Carol Oliviera has just moved into a shabby house with her two children outside the old cord factory. Their daughter Marie is thirteen, and as much as she is portrayed as an outsider, she has an important place in the novel. The core of the narrative, however, is the love triangle involving Marie’s older sister Angel, her boyfriend Myles and, of course, Birdy. A high school liaison that, as much is revealed in the first sentence of the novel, ends in death.
The writer Stewart O’Nan was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in 1961.
(Photo: Philippe MATSAS/Opale)
O’Nan has laid out his story in two major strands that alternate chapter by chapter. One is in the present tense. Here you experience the small town world from the perspective of the female characters. Sometimes you slip into Angel’s perception, sometimes into Birdy’s. Or from Carol, who grew up in the area. It is an art in itself how O’Nan unfolds his characters’ thought patterns and makes entire life atmospheres tangible with the help of the most inconspicuous details: “The mussel stands and Del’s lemonade stands were closed, and in the end we drove to One Fish in town for lunch Two Fish, a fast food joint in a former Burger King where we used to eat when we were little. It still had the original yellow-orange Formica tables, battered around the edges and dirty, every grain of salt scattered clearly visible.”
In the interpenetration of childhood memories and commodity aesthetics, it becomes apparent how well O’Nan knows how to combine a story and an image of society. The second narrative strand also contributes to this. Marie remembers the incidents from a time interval of several years and talks about the later trial against her sister and Myles. The distance gives her sentences a certain overview, but at the same time Marie as Angel’s sister is highly subjective, especially since her flashbacks are shaped by her current life situation. How the two narrative threads are connected remains open for a long time. But the contradictions in the perspectives are productive for the book. Where Carol perceives herself as a nurse in a noble retirement home, her daughter describes her as a “nurse in a nursing home”.
In general, the appeal of this novel also lies in how the social gradient that determines their lives is embedded in both the sketched scenes and the self-perception of the characters. While Carol and her ex-husband Frank struggle as much as the rest of Birdy’s family, Myles comes from a wealthy family. The effect he has on Angel and Birdy is largely due to this background. The social position and the money of his parents also help him later when it comes to courts and lawyers, hearings and lawsuits. It’s no coincidence that Frank once said: “This is Rhode Island. You have to know the right people there.”
Stewart O’Nan: Ocean State. Novel. Translated from the English by Thomas Gunkel. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2022. 256 pages, 22 euros.
At the same time, this creates an atmosphere of perceived injustice and underlying anger, which is directed against the circumstances and also against the feeling of paralysis of never being able to change anything. O’Nan also shows this anger and the latent readiness to use violence in the language of his characters. Thomas Gunkel has repeatedly found plausible correspondences in his intensive translation. “Bitch” and “stupid cow” are some of the more harmless terms.
As in his novels “Halloween” from 2003 or “Everybody, Everybody Loves You” from 2008, Stewart O’Nan combines stories of missing youths with the question of memory. In any case, the disintegration has always been one of his major themes, be it old family structures as in “Farewell from Chautauqua” (2002) or that of the rich middle class in his hometown of Pittsburgh as in “Emily, Alone” (2011). And because social fabrics don’t last and relationships break up, they at least have to be remembered. At least that’s how Marie sees it, who reveals at the very end of the book that the past events are not “dusty history” for her, but “always fresh, indelible like the first day of school when the new students spread old rumours”.
That ending, which clarifies a little too clearly some questions that were previously pleasantly unresolved, is not one of the book’s strengths. It’s also not entirely clear whether Stewart O’Nan can actually connect his two narrative strands with it or whether it’s more of a narrative impossibility. But that doesn’t detract from the power of his novel. O’Nan shows how the disintegration of social ties, trauma and deeply ingrained fear of loss in individuals are connected. And what actions can result from this in the worst case. For this he does not need sentences saturated with theory, but only a language that follows the movements of his characters: their gestures, their observations, their thoughts, their feelings.