(Bought at the Strand Bookstore for $6.95) I had been meaning to read this novel for a long time. I bought it because the titles of Chuck Klosterman's books have always intrigued me when I saw them on tables at used bookstores. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Eating the Dinosaur, The Visible Man. I don't really care about high school football, or rock bands of the 1980s, two of the topics which obsess the citizens of the titular tiny town in rural North Dakota, but the characters are well-drawn and Klosterman can be very funny. He focuses on three apparently unrelated Owl-ites--morose high school student Mitch (nicknamed Vanna because his last name Hrlicka has so few vowels), new teacher and lonely alcoholic Julia, and retiree Horace. Each chapter is from the point of view of one of these three, except two focusing on Julia's teaching colleague and football coach John Laidlaw who has a tendency to seduce his female students, and Mitch's fellow student, the antisocial and perhaps sociopathic Cubby Candy. Mitch is lonely, Julia is lonely, Horace is lonely. John and Cubby are nuts. Without revealing too much of the plot, their stories come to a rather abrupt ending with little resolution. But there are plenty of clever and insightful scenes of their desperate search for connection and meaning in a town with little to offer outside drinking, driving around and watching or playing football.
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