Everyday People

With his latest novel, ''Everyday People,'' Stewart O' Nan invents and enters the deprived African-American Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) neighborhood of East Liberty in the fall of 1998. At this time the neighborhood is about to be cut off from the rest of the city by the opening of a new expressway for buses. The town has always been victim to poverty and gang violence; during this one week, their patience will be tested more than usual.At the center of the novel is the Tolbert family. Chris, also known as Crest, a seventeen-year-old boy who is the youngest in the Tolbert family, has just returned from the hospital in a wheelchair, coming out of a tragic accident that occurred on that very expressway which left him paralyzed from the waist down. That accident happened to take the life of his best friend, Bean. His older brother, Eugene, has just returned from jail and found Jesus as a born-again Christian. Harold, the boys' kind and loving father, is in love with a younger man (Andre) but leaves him, rationalizing that his boys need him more. Harold's wife, Jackie, senses that something is not right (though she believes his lover to be a younger woman), and is furious because the man she has always trusted has become the kind of man she had sworn she would never tolerate. Vanessa, the teenage mother of Crest's son, Rashaan, is trying to make more of her life by trying to balance her responsibility as a mother with the stress of waiting tables, and takes an adult education class in African-American literature at night school and realizes that she wants to learn more, which hopefully, will motivate her to obtain a college degree. Miss Fisk, is an elderly woman who looks after Rashaan, the way she used to look after Bean. Besides this one family, there are people dying, children involved with gangs, and many others being robbed all around. Stewart O' Nan may be doubted because he is a white author who writes about an underprivileged African-American community and may not fully understand the experiences of those who actually live there. He captures the readers' attention with his vivid descriptions and interesting story plot. He incorporates the everyday lives that continue to go on in urban America. Many people are blind to see the reality of our world but this novel helps them listen to the voices of these characters, and let them know that they are everyday people, rather than gangsters, thieves, prostitutes or even drug addicts. Clearly the author wants the reader to realize how one crime can affect a whole community over a period of time. Honestly, I was a little disappointed because I'd rather of spent more time inside the head of Crest. He seemed like a good levelheaded boy who was influenced a lot by his surroundings. I would have loved to know all of his thoughts about what was going on in his community for that week, especially what he went through that will now change his life forever. It seemed like the underlying message of

Stewart O'Nan is an author who resolutely defies categorization. His works include the real-life horrors of "The Speed Queen" and "A Prayer for the Dying." But he also holds the mundane everyday up to light when he examines the bonds and responsibilities of family in "A World Away" and in this most recent work, "Everyday People.""Everyday People" is set in O'Nan's home town of Pittsburgh, a city defined by its close-knit neighborhoods. East Liberty is a predominantly black neighborhood. Once a thriving working-class community, a place of help and hope, it has been socially decimated by gangs and physically split by the construction of an express busway that effectively cuts it off from the rest of the city. The novel is built of chapters that read like sharply defined, independent but interrelated short stories. Each holds fully developed characters, conflict and a finality of ending. Taken together, though, they build in power as they show the families, friends and lovers bound together in a tightly drawn picture of community.These are gritty stories, well removed from worlds of polished comfort. The characters most central to the saga are those of the Tolbert family, each of whom is challenged by a different kind of desperation. Chris, 18, is a young man whose hopes were severed as completely as his spinal cord after a freak accident kills his best friend and confines him to a wheelchair. The twin comforts of pain pills and marijuana ease some of his physical symptoms, but he has to either uncover the inner resources to continue living or accept that he's effectively found himself in a life sentence without hope of parole.Chris' brother, Eugene, has recently returned home after a jail term; he's learned his lesson, found the Lord and is looking to help the younger men in his neighborhood avoid his pitfalls. His efforts, though, are not enough to save a man who was once his best friend. Their father, Harold, recently has admitted to himself he's a homosexual, though it's not a secret he's shared with his family. He finds himself questioning whether he's now tied to them by responsibility or love - if it hadn't been for Chris' accident, he might well have been out of the house and living a different life with his boyfriend. Jackie doesn't understand why her marriage has fallen apart, but she's held together by the certain knowledge that "tragedies would come and go, and only faith stayed the same.""Everyday People" is a book immersed in the rich complexity of character. In the most casual way, it explores the daily choices, large and small, deliberate or casual, that can forever change a life. It contrasts the choices offered by the paths of hope and despair. It investigates the pull and the obligations of love in all its wonderful, often difficult and sometimes ugly guises.

Sometimes I wonder why I keep reading this guy's books, since they are so relentlessly grim (it's no doubt not a coincidence that he's dressed all in black in the cover photo). At first, it looks like this one will be an exception, with the horrible events in the past rather than in the future. No such luck. And just when it looks like things are quietly winding down, the last word in the book is a kick in the stomach (and stands in for a chapter which I had been expecting, and dreading). Of course, O'Nan's skill in creating characters makes up for a lot of grimness (though it would be nice to read a slightly more cheerful book by him). A good deal of his skill is in what he let's us fill in for ourselves, rather than describing himself (what becomes of Sister Marita, for example). Highly recommended, but read it on a sunny day!

With compassion as his bellwether and acute observance as his compass Stewart O'Nan offers an intense story of people thwarted by poverty and racial prejudice. Set in East Liberty, a wasted Pittsburgh community, the novel's action is compressed to one week in the lives of the Tolbert family. An 18-year-old son, Chris, has been paralyzed by a fall from a freeway overpass. This graffiti writing escapade took the life of his best friend. His older brother, who found religion while in prison, is attempting to save another from the ravages of urban violence. While their father, Harold, is drawn to a homosexual relationship with a younger man. Many of their neighbors stoically bear the vicissitudes wrought simply by their birth while longing for a better life. Mr. O'Nan's ear for street patois is true, bringing authenticity to his spare yet compelling dialogue. As evidenced in his latest work, this author remains a master of minimalist prose blessed with maximum talent.