If someone told me that I would be writing a glowing review on a narrative that takes place in North Dakota, where nothing really happens other than a dead cat and blizzard, and that the three main protagonists you follow for the 270 page novel never truly meet, well I bet I wouldn’t be writing about Chuck Klosterman’s Downtown Owl. The fluid prose and intoxicating dialogue makes this seemingly boring town and the 300 people that inhabit it, center stage of modern man’s struggle against ennui and desires. A town I would have blown by on the highway, going to bigger and better and more exciting places, held me captive. Some books have a plot with intense drama; some have characters that drip with humanity; some have a setting that is too exotic to leave; this did not have that. This had a writer at the top of his game entertaining his audience with quirky humor, black comedy, ironic twist, darker humor, and drenching it with life’s tragedies and questions that hold the whole drink together.

You would have to be a good writer to try to search for truth in a place rarely anyone lives and fewer would ever visit. But Klosterman finds it at the intersection of an old man with little to live for, a teenage boy’s hatred of sex fiend teacher, and a new teacher just out of college who is drinking her way out of boredom from a life she never wanted, but finds titillating. In the town of Owl, where there will always be more bars than ways out to better places, the reader will find renewed faith why prose will always be better than what is on the television.

What strikes you most as you page through this book, is how easy the writer makes the most surreal lifestyles comfortable to explore. Reading Downtown Owl is like getting into a car with a bunch of teenagers and remembering how good it feels to drive fast getting nowhere and not caring because everything you want as a reader is right in that car. He introduces plenty of characters who never go anywhere with the author and do just enough maybe to be foils for the three main characters. Klosterman’s narrator will go off on enjoyable tangents that will reveal an important question about modern topic such as sex and alcohol addiction, loneness and marriage, but then leaves that person at a corner as he speeds away to another character. The reader will lose something by these abandoned characters, but we know that the writer is filled with confidence and we want to be with him driving instead of in town’s dead dust.

The book never gets difficult to read or continue, yet Klosterman does not use cliffhangers or leads to other characters. He stops a character in mid thought as if he receives a telephone call to go somewhere else. You follow and don’t complain because you have a feeling the narrator just might drop you next. But he doesn’t, he gives you a satisfying ending that allows you to leave Owl and never look back because you can’t, because you know the writer left with you. The switching of character voices by chapter is becoming a cliché in modern novels and making almost every book you pick up a collection of short stories. But Klosterman’s book is acceptable because he fills in with his narrative voice that you trust is a valued tour guide in a demented but fascinating town. He stays in the same time and place but just switches perspective. This gives the book a unifying feel and keeps it fresh throughout.

This book will remind you of Tom Robbins from Even the Cowgirls Sing the Blues meeting Chuck Palahniuk’s of Fight Club. It is fresh and rewarding and guaranteed to make you laugh during it and at the end, shake your head. There is not much more a book should or a writer can accomplish. Have fun in Downtown Owl.