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Summary
Summary
"Extraordinary...beautifully precise...[an] earnestly ambitious debut." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A wild, angry, and devastating masterpiece of a book." --NPR
"[A] descendent of the Dickensian 'social novel' by way of Jonathan Franzen: epic fiction that lays bare contemporary culture clashes, showing us who we are and how we got here." -- O, The Oprah Magazine
"A book that has stayed with me ever since I put it down." --Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers
One sweltering night in 2013, four former high school classmates converge on their hometown in northeastern Ohio.
There's Bill Ashcraft, a passionate, drug-abusing young activist whose flailing ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to post-BP New Orleans, and now back home with a mysterious package strapped to the undercarriage of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting her family and the mother of her best friend and first love, whose disappearance spurs the mystery at the heart of the novel; Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he's tried desperately to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the washed-up captain of the football team triggers the novel's shocking climax.
Set over the course of a single evening, Ohio toggles between the perspectives of these unforgettable characters as they unearth dark secrets, revisit old regrets and uncover--and compound--bitter betrayals. Before the evening is through, these narratives converge masterfully to reveal a mystery so dark and shocking it will take your breath away.
Author Notes
Stephen Markley is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Markley's previous books include the novel Ohio , the memoir Publish This Book : The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book , and the travelogue Tales of Iceland . He lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Markley's standout debut novel (following nonfiction works Publish This Book and Tales of Iceland), four former high school classmates return to their Ohio hometown to make amends. Once a bastion of steel-mill industry, New Canaan has been corroded by economic downturn and opiates; it's pervaded by a sense of disillusionment shared by the four, whose rudderless adult lives pale alongside the blinding lights of their adolescence. Over the course of one night-interlaced with high school flashbacks-the four settle old scores and uncover some of the town's nefarious secrets. There's Bill Ashcraft, who drives into town to deliver a package to a familiar recipient; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate who's sucked into the mystery of her former lover's disappearance; veteran Dan Eaton, who returns from Afghanistan with a prosthetic eyeball and emotional wounds; and Tina Ross, who confronts a violent part of her past. As the night progresses, the long-buried truth behind a horrifying town legend takes shape, offering a window into the raw forces that shape the town and its residents. Markley's novel is alternately disturbing and gorgeous, providing a broad view of the anxieties of a post-9/11 Middle America and the complexities of the humans who navigate them. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Markley's weighty debut novel is set in small-town Ohio, post 9/11, and catalogs the myriad ways that war and recession have failed a generation who have known little else. In New Canaan, a town suffering after factories shutter, readers follow four stories of twentysomethings who knew each other in high school, and the fallout of long-held secrets. Bill is ferreting an unknown package to help make ends meet; Stacey searches for her long-lost love, who disappeared shortly after her mother found the two of them together and unleashed fury; Dan has returned from Afghanistan missing an eye; and Tina executes a destructive revenge plot. Their intertwining tales share characters and themes, but plot connections are revealed slowly. Markley's writing is beautifully descriptive, firmly planting readers in the setting even as the author jumps in time, often from paragraph to paragraph. After the leisurely paced majority of the book, the final 100 pages feel rushed, and the climax comes from seemingly nowhere, but even this does little to take away from an insightful, tragic story.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GRADUATES' young heads are full of anticipation: What will we become? How will our friends turn out? Will we be the voice of our generation? It may be that our imaginations burn brightest at these gateway junctures, latching onto ideas about ourselves that prove difficult to ever let loose. So, naturally, a class reunion is an irresistibly juicy narrative device for writers. The trope can take many forms, whether set at an actual alumni gathering, as in Mary Higgins Clark's "Nighttime Is My Time"; or applied more loosely, as in Hanya Yanagihara's ensemble bildungsroman "A Little Life." Still, the cruel pleasures are the same: We get to see how those teenage hopes have played out in adulthood. For the characters in Stephen Markley's first novel, "Ohio," the future has not exactly gone according to plan. Set in the imaginary Ohio town of New Canaan - which serves as a microcosm for all that has gone wrong with Middle America this century - the story focuses on 10 members of the high school class of 2003 whose youthful friendships and various romantic entanglements still haunt them a decade later. Once they were the popular kids, celebrities of their small-town Rust Belt universe, but time has not been kind to them as they close in on their 30 s, and in fact a few of them haven't survived to see 29. The book begins with the funeral of a former football hero and soldier killed in Iraq. Shortly thereafter, another in the group dies of a drug overdose in Los Angeles, and the remaining eight either drift apart or lose touch altogether. But one night in the summer of 2013 the surviving members of the clique come together again, by sheer coincidence, back in New Canaan. The crew satisfies all the American High School Archetypes we know so well: the boorish football jock, the conniving mean girl, the smarmy prepster, the Christian athlete who discovers she might be gay, the opinionated jackass, the innocent, puzzled beauty. But they are never simply stereotypes. The majority of the novel takes place over a single period of roughly 12 hours wherein secrets are revealed, betrayals unveiled, terrible choices made, regrets experienced. This sounds cornier than it is. Their convergence is a contrivance, but it allows Markley to do some enormously clever things with the structure of the book, essentially composed of four novellas, each focusing on a different character with his or her own purpose for returning home. The reader witnesses the same night from distinct, and often conflicting, perspectives, which creates a beautifully layered, "Rashomon"-like effect in which threads left dangling at the end of one section are picked up in the next, and casual details suddenly take on new, surprising significance. There's a real pleasure in this hopscotching narrative: With each new point of view, a clearer sense of the hidden story emerges as the reader slowly pieces together some shocking revelations. But Markley clearly has more on his mind than a tightly wound plot. This book wears its significance on its sleeve, showering its characters in hot-button issues of the past dozen years, including opiate addiction, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamophobia, fracking, the Occupy movement, alt-right militias, self-harm, sexual exploitation and politicized rage. The novel churns with such ambitious social statements and insights that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid. Nearly every character delivers a speech that wouldn't feel out of place on "Rachel Maddow" or "Tticker Carlson," and occasionally an omniscient narrator interrupts to explain the broader implications of, for example, the 2008 housing crisis. "Bill had never actually met a person to whom he did not enjoy ranting," one character observes, astutely. "Ohio" would have been a better novel with less of this explication. The most moving parts of the book are those that step back and let the events and the actions speak for themselves, as when one character (the shy, bookish one from high school) recalls his three tours in Afghanistan. The beautifully precise details are all the more vivid for their lack of accompanying commentary. The real core of this earnestly ambitious debut lies not in its sweeping statements but in its smaller moments, in its respectful and bighearted renderings of damaged and thwarted lives. It's the human scale that most descriptively reveals the truth about the world we're living in. DAN CHAON is the author, most recently, of "III Will."
Kirkus Review
A group of young men and women aggressively affected by the post-9/11 world reconverge in their Ohio hometown.Markley's (Tales of Iceland, 2013, etc.) flagrantly symphonic debut novel is effectively four linked novellas, with each section circling around a high school friend or acquaintance of Rick, who was killed in action in Iraq. Each person has hit on hard times in their 20s, and on one evening in their hometown of New Canaan, they're laboring to set things right. Bill has an omnivorous drug habit and is hauling a plainly illicit but unidentified (until the climax) package north from New Orleans; Stacey wants to confront the homophobic mother of her high school girlfriend; Dan is an Afghanistan war vet who wants to catch up with an old flame; and Tina has a score to settle with the jock who sexually abused her in high school. Markley is a knockout storyteller, infusing each section with realistic detail, from the drudgery of Walmart work to war to the fleeting ecstasies of drugs to violence, especially self-harm. (Tina's section is especially tough reading on that last front.) High school, Markley writes, provided "stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around," and he's followed through. There's an unsettling feeling, though, that while he's mastered complex characterization, it's often in service of simplistic broader portraiture about the Rust Belt. New Canaan, "sclerotic in every capacity," is doom-and-gloom to the edge of caricature: Its economy is rotted and shored up on meth and disability checks, its community reduced to pro-Trump resentment and anti-Muslim anger. The culture Markley describes unquestionably exists, and strong novels about America's underclass are lamentably thin on the ground. But this novel is best appreciated as a set of portraits rather than (as the title suggests) a definitive statement about an entire state.This is a big character-driven epic, though it's overinflated in its pronouncements about its setting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Markley's ambitious foray into fiction (following a memoir, Publish This Book) reunites four high school classmates on a fateful summer night in their Ohio hometown, in what reads like a darker-themed epilog to Friday Night Lights. Hollowed out by a generation of war, addiction, and crippling recession, the quintessential Midwestern town of New Canaan serves as a magnet for our protagonists, as they struggle to break free of their shared histories. There's an antiwar provocateur whose activism gave way to drugs and alcohol, driving back into town with a package taped to his truck; a doctoral candidate whose forbidden lover has not been heard from in nearly ten years; a reticent war veteran who chose three tours in Iraq over a future with the love of his life; and the quarterback's ex-girlfriend, whose beauty and popularity mask a shame that she finally resolves to address. Markley's prose sparkles with insight and supports an intricate narrative architecture that recalls Nathan Hill's The Nix and Patrick Somerville's This Bright River. VERDICT This bleak but honest survey of 21st-century America is highly recommended for all literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, 2/11/18.]- Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Ohio PRELUDE RICK BRINKLAN AND THE LAST LONESOME NIGHT Excerpted from Ohio by Stephen Markley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
