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Type of bind: Audio Download
Label: audible.com
Manufacturer: audible.com
Publishing house: audible.com
Studio: audible.com
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New York Times Bestselling Author Chuck Kosterman's First Novel
Somewhere in North Dakota, there is a town called Owl that isn't there. Disco is over, but punk never happened. They don't have cable. They don't really have pop culture, unless you count grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. They hate the government and impregnate teenage girls. But that's not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it's perfect.
Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. She gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer who listens to Goats Head Soup. Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. He consumes a lot of coffee, thinks about his dead wife, and understands the truth. They all know each other completely, except that they've never met.
Like a colder, Reagan-era version of The Last Picture Show fused with Saturday Night Lights, Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing. Loaded with detail and unified by a (very real) blizzard, it's technically about certain people in a certain place at a certain time ... but it's really about a problem. And the problem is this: What does it mean to be a normal person? And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl what matters more is how you ask the question.
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Rated by buyers -
What a great audiobook! This is one that I'm glad I listened to rather than read on paper - I think it's a great story with amazing characters and will stand on its own in paper form, but the narrators added such an interesting element to the book.
This is a rather Seinfeld-ian collection of characters and events. Almost nothing happens except the inner thoughts and day-to-day situations we all find ourselves dealing with. If you seek a complex plot and intricately linked characters, this is not the book for you.
Did I mention the characters? I couldn't stop chuckling over many of Horace Jones' observations and turns of phrase. "He might as well move to California and drink orange juice." Horace is gruff and aging, but he is a closeted philosopher, spending much of his time chewing the fat with his buddies at the local diner. Julia Rabia, the young, aimless teacher who moves to Owl for a teaching job, figures she'll have problems scoring weed in this little town (she's right), and then promptly sits back to smoke most of what she has left just to pass some time. She becomes the sought after sex kitten of Owl - for the very first time in her life, she's the prettiest, most interesting, and most fought over woman in the room. She and her free-drink-seeking friend, Naomi, cruise the town's few bars, and Julia shrugs off all date seekers until she finds the one interesting man who doesn't seem to want her at all. Mitch Hrlicka is the wise beyond his years high schooler who hates rock and roll music, is amazed by his middle-aged blow-hard football coach/English teacher's ability to nail so many of his female classmates, and refuses to decorate his room because he doesn't want to be defined by what people see on his walls. If you only read this book for Mitch's responses to his teacher's exam about Orwell's 1984, you'll walk away happy.
Are these characters amazing? Heroic? Symbolic? Not really. Klosterman presents them to us as people who live in a small town of fewer than 1,000 people where almost nothing interesting ever happens and where, while everyone seemingly knows everything about everyone else, these characters don't know each other.
Downtown Owl is well written. I enjoyed the story. I liked the characters. And I especially appreciate the added depth to this story provided by the audiobook narrators. This is my introduction to Klosterman - my very first book of what I presume will be many of his that I read. And I'm holding up my lit lighter while swaying from side to side in appreciation of Klosterman's easy grasp of the economic, political, and pop culture (Hrlicka's observations of the senseless music his friends listen to is priceless) atmosphere of the early 80s.
Simply put, this book was a joy to listen to. It is so refreshing to be able to read a book just for the sake of reading it. Bravo.
Rated by buyers -
Sometimes a book sneaks up on you.
I wasn't looking for an audio book - I didn't notice that's what this was - and I must admit to being a little disappointed when I saw the squat little box in the mail. I envisioned trying to find time to force myself to listen to it. Assumptions, as is often the case, can be misleading. I have a 45 minute ride to work, which I usually devote to music, but I'm glad now that I decided to substitute "Downtown Owl" instead.
If the name makes no sense to you, Owl is a fictional small town in North Dakota, where everybody knows everybody and things don't change a lot. The story is told primarily from the viewpoint of three people: Mitch, a 16-year-old high school boy who does a lot of thinking; Julia, an imported 23-year-old teacher whose means of attaching to her new community is spending evenings at the local bar; and Horace, a grizzled old widower-farmer who holds down a stool at the cafe daily to reminisce and debate with his cronies. Nothing much happens; Mitch's days consist of imaginative methods of doing in his history teacher/football coach, who is bedding the local high school girls with apparent impunity, much to the disgust of Mitch; Julia's days, in her second teaching job (her very first was Chicago, so this seems much easier to her) devolve every evening to getting sometimes mouthily drunk with her best friend, another teacher, and daydreaming about the local untouchable bachelor; and Horace, though he secretly considers himself a literary cut above his buddies because he reads so much, spends the better part of his waking hours thinking about his dead wife, gone twenty years.
I have a hard time, generally, concentrating on shifting conversation while I am driving; I much prefer actual books, so that I can play the game we all play when our minds wander and reread a paragraph. After the very first disc of "Downtown Owl" I didn't have to back up the story; I was drawn into these people's simple lives, feeling a kinship with their experiences. I went through high school a couple decades before Mitch, but all those years came back as I listened. We had a philandering statutory-rapist teacher in our high school also, who was looked upon much as Mitch's teacher is. Everybody knew about it, but nobody did anything. We had an incredible-hulk student also, whom everyone was shy of getting near; and we had a loose-cannon car aficianado, whom everyone was actively scared of. We had a teacher like Julia; and what small town doesn't have its requisite collection of old codgers whose permanent day address is the final six seats at the counter or the corner table at the cafe?
Without creating a great deal of drama, Mr Klosterman brings us into the world of Owl and its citizens, making it a bit like a more decadent version of Lake Woebegon. He homes in on the lives of the three mentioned, drawing them into the sphere of attention, until he brings their three disparate plights together in the very last chapters. What was earlier a deceptively placid rendering of life in a small plains town becomes a gripping struggle for life, and our three protagonists are shown to be remarkably similar. Each one is somehow an outsider, even though, as in Horace's case, he's lived in Owl his entire 73 years; each one is someone everyone in town thinks they know well, but ultimately aren't understood well at all.
Mr. Klosterman has obviously spent some time in the North Dakota area, and makes his town believeable, as well as its citizens. His casual beginning of the book with a news recounting of a deadly blizzard is so neatly done, you forget about it until reaching the final chapter. I felt the cold wind, I saw the boozy interior of the bar, and I knew every one of the people in the town of Owl. Very good building of characters and story; no real plot, because it's not built on plot, but is more character study and faux-history (although there actually was a blizzard as recounted). It changed my mind a little about audio books. If the subsequent one I get holds my interest like this one did, I guess I'm hooked.
Rated by buyers -
I really appreciate the author's work. His witty observations make me think and at times have made me angry. He's a great writer. I really looked forward to this book.
He didn't disapoint with the characters' dialogue and the overall observations of life in a seemingly quiet, small town circa the early 1980s. While I didn't grow up in a small town, his depictions sure did seem accurate.
Ultimately, if you like Klosterman's writing, I think you'll enjoy this book.
Rated by buyers 
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This is one of the most well-written books I've encountered this year. I will definitely be reading more Klosterman books in the future because I find him to be a great storyteller and character creator. In some ways, his writing reminds me of Douglas Coupland's post-modern pop culture tales.
Klosterman has created a fictitious small town in North Dakota named Owl and written about the people who lived there in 1983 and 1984. Like many small towns, there's no cable television, no movie theater, a few local bars, everyone knows everyone's business, and the most important thing is how the high school football team is doing. What do you do in a town like this to keep from going crazy? You just live.
Klosterman tells the story completely in 3rd person, but each chapter follows around a different character: Julia, a young female teacher new to the town; Mitch, a male high school student who is obsessed with getting the two toughest kids in school to fight; and Horace, an old man who has recently lost his wife. Klosterman leads you into each of their heads where you learn their deepest secrets (like how Horace was cheated out of his wife's insurance money). You also get to hear the town gossip (like which student the English professor is sleeping with).
Since I listened to this as a book-on-CD rather than reading it, I found myself trying to find excuses to ride in my car longer so that I could hear the end of the gossipy tales the characters were telling. Each chapter features a different voice actor depending on if the chapter focuses on Julia, Mitch, or Horace.
I especially enjoyed the very first long conversation Julia had with the guy at the bar she'd developed a crush on. What made it unique was that Klosterman let us know, line by line, what each character said versus what they meant by what they said. I think he got it spot on for Julia despite being a male who has never been inside a woman's head before.
The ending was an extreme oh-my-god-what-the... type ending that I absolutely didn't expect. Everything leads to this and the reader doesn't know who will live or die.
I read enough that I really appreciate something different every now and then. Klosterman is my new Coupland.
Rated by buyers 
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Well this was my very first experience with an audio book, and I have to say I'm hooked. The story was overall pretty entertaining - 3 main characters/narrarators: a high school student, a young school teacher and an old man. The student and teacher's parts were entertaining, but I found myself getting bored at times when the old man spoke. I'd definitely recommend this audio book for a long trip, or to listen to on during your morning commute (which is what I did over a few weeks) - it made the ride fly by.
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