Debut novel ambitious, suspenseful
On a summer night in 2013, nine years after they attended high school together, four young people return to the fictional town of New Canaan, Ohio, halfway between Cleveland and Columbus.
Stephen Markley's ambitious and suspenseful first novel devotes long sections to each of these characters, only gradually allowing the intersections of their lives and those of their classmates and families to emerge.
High-strung Bill, ostracized in high school for his opposition to the war in Iraq, has been working for, and getting fired by, a string of liberal organizations.
Intellectual Stacey, working on a doctoral dissertation involving “transnational modernism and ecocriticism,” has decided to confront the judgmental Christian mother of Lisa Han, Stacey's high-school love.
Sweet-natured Dan, out of the Army after three tours • “Ohio” (Simon & Schuster, 496 pages, $26) by Stephen Markley
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the last of which left him blind in one eye, has returned to meet up with his highschool sweetheart, who is now married.
And wounded Tina, who suffered at the hands of the school's football star, is returning to settle a score.
The town to which they return has gone steadily downhill during the past decade, as have most of the people who have remained there. Stuck in dead-end jobs, many have turned to drugs and alcohol.
As the title suggests, At a glance Markley's novel reflects more than the romantic difficulties of a few 20-somethings. These characters and their peers represent the 21st-century decline in mid-America that this small, predominantly white town portrays.
Markley, fortunately, doesn't push this point too hard, instead allowing political and social events to influence his characters tangentially.
Their New Canaan — both in flashbacks and in the present — is a place where the only people who matter are those in their limited age group. Their feverish selfinvolvement suggests that they have remained stuck in the emotional excesses of adolescence.
Markley doesn't entirely avoid cliche. At its core, this is a novel about the long-term consequences of reprehensible behavior by a football star and a semipsychopathic “mean girl.”
Readers should also not hold out hope that the four separate stories will meet in some overarching plot, or that there will be some reason more than mere coincidence and narrative convenience that all four characters descend on New Canaan on the same day.
The author knows how to dangle a tantalizing hook, but the pieces of his puzzle don't ultimately assemble into any surprise.
The value of the novel isn't in its plot or its mysteries, but in its knowledge of how the intense pressures of a small group of people forced into community in adolescence can permanently warp the lives of those playing out their roles in it.