Snow Angels

Stewart O'Nan delivers yet another tour de force in sorrow and loss in "Snow Angels." What makes O'Nan's fiction so compelling is his innate ability to render real people, places and things: the yearnings of 14 year old Artie; the despair of Glenn Marchand; the fumbling separation of Don and Louise. O'Nan also invests in the non-human and inanimate objects of his worlds -- from the symbolic poignancy of the bunny given by Glenn to Tara to the character of his faithful dog Bomber, O'Nan takes care of everyone and everything in his novels. As with many of his other novels, O'Nan introduces the existence of tragedy early and then spends the rest of the novel building up to it. To write about it here would be a great disservice. The only area where "Snow Angels" went awry for me was in the "place" department. O'Nan usually does such a fantastic job in rendering the geography of the places in his novels that the reader can actually picture the environs where the story takes place. In "Snow Angels," either through my own failing or O'Nan's I just wasn't able to picture it. Still, this one flaw (if indeed it is a flaw) would not be enough to dissuade me from wholeheartedly recommending "Snow Angels." "Snow Angels was also made into a movie Snow Angels. If you are looking to explore more of Stewart O'Nan's works, I would suggest A Prayer for the Dying, Songs for the Missing: A Novel, The Good Wife: A Novel and The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy.

I was watching EBERT AND ROEPER one night and was delighted to learn that one of Stewart O'Nan's books, SNOW ANGELS, had been made into a movie. Since LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER has been one of my favorite books this year, I decided to give O'Nan's first novel a go. I was surprised to learn he wrote it so long ago, 1994. O'Nan has a gift for characterization far beyond anything you will find on the best-seller list. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER was non-fiction. That's also the case here. SNOW ANGELS starts out with a murder and we get details from two different viewpoints: from the murdered woman Annie Marchand in flashback, and from a fourteen-year-old boy, Artie Parkinson, whom she babysat before she was married. Artie's parents are also going through a divorce, and Artie tries his level best to pretend he doesn't care. Annie Marchand was murdered by her estranged husband and there are parallels between the two adult relationships. The characters seem to be driven more by emotion than anything else. O'Nan is a very subtle writer. He shows us the beginning of a romantic relationship between Artie and a girl on his bus whom he had made fun of previously. Most of the novel is gut-wrenching, especially the murder scene and another one where a toddler goes missing, but O'Nan manages to sneak in some humor as well, especially in the scenes between Artie and his pot-smoking buddy Warren. They mutter under their breaths when Mr. Chervenick, their band director, tries to teach the marching band "the tornado' for the umpteenth time, and they smoke "a roach" when they're supposed to be looking for the missing toddler. The humor is irreverent and politically incorrect but definitely true to life. There is an intriguing quote at the end of the novel regarding human relationships. Artie says, "Though it was already happening to me, I could not see how I would ever come to hate the people I loved." O'Nan is being purposefully ambiguous I think. It could he his mother he's talking about or it could be Lila Raybern, his new girlfriend. O'Nan writes these short, working class novels, SNOW ANGELS is only 305 pages long in bold print, but he packs more into these few pages than Michener did in his thousand-page tomes.

I first bought this book four years ago and have read it 5 times since. Haunting images, desperate characters. Although this book is about murder and divorce, there are no villans and no heros. This book made Stewart O'Nan my favorite author. Also check out THE SPEED QUEEN

This was my first Stewart O'Nan book, which launched me on a mission to buy every book he has ever wrote (of which none will disappoint.) I appreciated how well O'Nan creates the momentum, a calculated and skilled accounting of events in a boy's life, Arthur, that challenges his ability to accept and move on. He effectively conveys the confusion of youth when faced with parental divorce, first love, and the ramifications of being in the right place and a terrible time to make a grusome discovery. O'Nan sets up the story in a small Pennsylvannia town, and you feel every ice storm and foot fall on crunching snow as the adult Arthur comes back to town and eventually must make peace with himself.

I found the book on a table at a university library. The title interested me and I read the first couple of pages. I was hooked. At first, I was amused by the interests and high school life of the protagonist, Arthur Parkinson. I thought,"Hey, just like my high school." Then I began to appreciate the layering that experiences and events had on the individual character's perspective. I also like the meandering fashion the story had. Events take place linear, concurrently, overlapping and intersecting at the most interesting places, just as life happens. Take any small town tragedy and you'll find more twists and turns than you would have ever imagined. Mr. O'Nan's story took on the complexity of this situation and grounded it in Arthur, a character many people will identify with.