By Andrew Hedglin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 30)
Stephen Markley’s gripping debut novel Ohio tells the story of events, both private and national, quotidian and shocking, that reverberate tragic consequences in the once seemingly-idyllic heartland of America.
On one fateful summer night in 2013, four former classmates are compelled to visit their struggling hometown of New Canaan, Ohio, after they thought they had left it behind for good.
Bill Ashcraft is a drug-addled, abrasive political activist on a mission to deliver a mysterious package. Stacy Moore is a thoughtful grad student, in town to meet with the disapproving mother of her high school love. Dan Eaton, an unassuming Iraq War veteran, has been convinced by his former fiancé to visit a gravely ill favorite teacher. Tina Ross, a big box-store worker who moved a few towns over, comes back to gain closure from a traumatic event.
The stars of the book, however, are the memories of those left behind: Rick, Bill’s childhood best friend and deceased Iraq War vet; Ben, who was Bill and Rick’s go-between friend and songwriter who died in a drug-related accident; Lisa, Bill’s girlfriend and Stacy’s best friend, presumably gone to look for her lost father in Vietnam; and Todd, Tina’s boyfriend and has-been football star, whose life has been sidetracked by poverty and poor choices.
The story is, at its core, about longing, love, and lost innocence, and for that, ghosts dominate the landscape.
There is no anchor scene in which the four main characters are together, but the story is tightly bound together by their collective experience, deftly portrayed in flashbacks from ten years earlier. While the narrative slowly builds, Markley is particularly adept at never quite tipping his hand as to where the story is going, leading to several crescendoing shocks. The contrivances needed to make this happen are relatively minor.
The pre-release publicity and certain subsequent reviews for this book like to talk about it in relation to the zeitgeist: this is what 9/11, the Iraq War, economic decline, and the opioid crisis have wrought.
Those cultural markers do feature heavily in the story, but they serve to enhance, not limit, the characters. National problems have personal consequence. Ohio is a human story, with timeless themes. How many generations have returned from war? For how many has the economy been robust? This novel could have been set in the 1970s with minimal alteration to the essence of the story or characters.
Even the town itself is claimed to be cursed, at least by its woebegone denizens. They say its misfortunes are the result of The Murder That Never Was. Less substantial than even a rumor, this urban legend is propagated by those have little evidence to support it. For the more cynical characters, such as Bill, the point of the theory is to make those whose repeat it feel elevated, as if their problems couldn’t be merely the results of a combination of larger forces and inner demons.
The experience of reading the novel, while melancholic, flows smoothly. It is occasionally buoyed by delicious dramatic irony, such as when characters stubbornly misremember or misinterpret relationships between characters, events in the high school parking lot, and the song lyrics of their dead friend and minor troubadour Ben Harrington.
The main characters are, at their core, primarily driven and deceived by love, some to greater detriment than others.
Each has the burden of heartbreak to show for it. And a broken heart is the price paid by the reader for sharing in their worthwhile story.
Andrew Hedglin is a bookseller at Lemuria and a life-long Jackson area resident.
Signed first editions of Ohio available here. Ohio was Lemuria’s September 2018 selection for our First Edition Club for Fiction.
Comments are closed.