First novel Ohio very American

Hometowns have a certain gravity. Some people never escape it, they stick around and become a kind of civic furniture, accepted for what they are and tolerated until they wear out or break. Others seem to break free only to snap back at intervals like comets, hurtling through high school reunions, family holidays and weddings of old friends. Some leave or vanish, inciting whispers and legends. A few come home in a box.

New Canaan, Ohio, is a fictional place — a sister city to Winesburg or Spoon River. It was constructed in the head of Stephen Markley, an ambitious writer who seems to have taken Tom Wolfe’s admonitory essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” to heart. For Markley wants to tell the story

of the nation as well as the stories of the characters. He has plopped down this imaginary hometown in a rich and crazy novel called simply Ohio, located “out here on the edges of the fracturing economy,” and animated a few of its sons and daughters.

They were high school classmates, now they’re older. The book begins in 2007, with a Great Recession-era funeral parade for a fallen soldier, former high school football star Rick Brinklan, killed by a sniper’s bullet in Iraq. Nearly the whole town turns out, though the symbolism is depressing; Brinklan’s casket is empty, due to be returned to Walmart after the speeches and the tears. (Yes, you can buy caskets at Walmart, though it looks like it only started offering them in 2010, so gotcha Stephen Markley.)

Notably absent from the “jingoistic spectacle” is Brinklan’s high school running buddy Bill Ashcraft, a basketball star (who may or may not have played one-on-one against Akron native LeBron James in some summer camp) who became skeptical of American exceptionalism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Ashcraft wore his leftist politics on his chest in the form of a T-shirt that caused friction between him and everyone else. He and Rick were close as brothers, close enough to casually damage each other.

Rick’s old girlfriend, Kaylyn, made the parade. She’s one who stayed. She’s sitting next to Rick’s parents, zonked out of her mind.

Flash forward to 2013. Bill is wasted, making a nonstop run from New Orleans to New Canaan, ferrying a mysterious brick-like package. He doesn’t know what it is, maybe doesn’t want to know. That same night other former classmates converge on the town. Stacey Moore, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household, has returned looking for the friend who saved and abandoned her; Dan Eaton, after three tours of duty in Iraq, is back looking to reconnect with the (now-married) love of his life; Tina Ross is looking for closure with her jock ex-boyfriend, the one who didn’t make it at The Ohio State University and the NFL after all.

America is all up in here, with its opioids and crystal meth, its real estate, its shuttered factories and its broken children. Hope has been revoked in the shadowland, and while Markley sometimes strains to pump ruined glory into every line, you keep reading, mainly because you want to find out what happens to these characters, who feel a lot more real than the speeches they’re sometimes called upon to orate.

This is a nearly great first novel.

Its failures are of excess, and what every editor knows is that it’s a lot better to have a writer who’s too audacious, too in love with the spirit that forces his hands to the keyboard and sets his mind racing, than to have to try to drag something out of those cool and timid sorts. Readers might receive some of Markley’s characters as the blowhard drunks they are — yet still care about them. And if the plot explodes at the end, well, that explosion in retrospect seems as inevitable as the crash and din at the end of a superhero movie.

I like the quieter conversations and the way the author sketches the social dynamics; I’m guessing that if you knew Markley in high school you’ll probably see, if not yourself, at least some common friend in this book. The cruelties and the tragedies, the unfathomable bonds that teenagers form, the old photo creased and quartered and — for reasons not completely understood — saved; all that feels right.

There is calculation here; you will no doubt perceive the author being clever and dumb. But he takes risks and sometimes hits on something. His girls feel a little too carefully rendered, his boys a little too wild in the way we all wish we’d been, but it’s a start. A startling start.