Ohio by Stephen Markley

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 21, 2018

In 2007, high school football star Rick Brinklan gets a parade with a casket borrowed from Wal-Mart because the Marines need to keep his body while investigating his death. The town of New Canaan celebrates with a cake decorated with an America flag and speeches by the members of his football team and ex-girlfriends (except those who are too high or ashamed to speak). Six years later, four vehicles converge on New Canaan and Stephen Markley launches four intersecting stories.

Bill Ashcraft has driven drunk and high from New Orleans to Ohio, where he plans to deliver a package. He doesn’t know what’s in the package but he’s sure it isn’t legal. His return to New Canaan and chance encounters in taverns (not to mention even more drug and alcohol consumption) trigger high school memories of betrayals and broken friendships, one involving one of Rick’s girlfriends, who has a woeful story of her own to tell. Ashcraft’s more recent memories include the loss of his best friend from New Canaan, a singer-songwriter who died in LA while Ashcraft was attending the Occupy protest in New York.

Stacey Moore is traveling to New Canaan to deliver a letter. Stacey discovered her sexual identity in New Canaan, skating on the periphery of Brinklan’s crowd despite her relationships with Ashcraft’s girlfriend and with the songwriter. Stacey’s time in New Canaan, like Ashcraft’s, is punctuated by memories (mostly of her adventurous sex life), but she also has a conversation that gives the reader a clue about the contents of Ashcraft’s package.

Dan Eaton, home from the war but missing an eye and part of his soul, returns to New Canaan to see Hailey Kowalczyk, the object of his childhood crush and enduring love, who is now married to a kid he knew in school. Dan signed up for his last tour because as bad as Iraq or Afghanistan might be, they feel more like home to him than Ohio. Before Dan can find Hailey, he is waylaid by Ashcraft, encounters several high school friends at New Canaan bars, responds to violence as only a man with one eye can, and remembers disturbing incidents from his tours of duty.

Tina Ross didn’t move far from New Canaan. She makes a quick trip to New Canaan to find her high school love, a football player who used her, abused her, and left her damaged. Her story is, in many ways, the most gruesome part of the novel; it is not suitable for squeamish readers.

In the final chapter, we finally learn what was in the package Ashcraft brought to New Canaan and see the consequences of its delivery. The story then jumps ahead four years to resolve a couple of mysteries and tie characters together in new ways.

The destructive power of the secrets we carry is one of the novel’s themes. Another is the nature of dreams of the future, the random ways that life interferes with the opportunity to achieve them, and the need to fight for your dreams even if you know the battle cannot be won. Another is change: the way people change, the way people are changing the Earth, and the fear that the world might be changing in dark ways to which many residents of towns like New Canaan are deliberately oblivious.

Characters engage in political debate, but the disagreements are expressed in intelligent language; neither side of the divide is presented as buffoonery. At the same time, the debates expose the narrow-minded hypocrisy of bumper sticker patriots who base their opinions on the assumed superiority of white heterosexual American-born males (although readers who share that viewpoint might think the bigots get the better of the arguments).

Characters are the strength of Ohio. Many of the primary and collateral characters are decent people who make an effort to help broken people. The broken characters are inspirational in their own way as they “rage against the faceless entropy” and “endure the Truth and struggle to extinction.” As much as the novel rages against small town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, it also recognizes that small towns are filled with people who reject bigotry and embrace the values of compassion and understanding. Those people are often taken for granted, but they are the people who give small towns whatever heart and soul they might have.

The first three stories are exceptional. Tina’s story is powerful but a bit forced, while the key event of the final chapter is too far removed from the story that precedes it to be convincing. While the four stories intersect, they never quite add up to something greater than their parts. Apart from the key event in the last chapter to which I alluded, the ways in which the stories tie together in the final chapter are clever, but the resolution doesn’t do justice to the deeper stories that precede it.

Still, some of the novel’s passages are breath-stopping in their perceptive examination of troubled characters who are struggling to find a way to make sense of life. While the stories don’t quite cohere to make an entirely successful novel, viewed a series of long, connected stories that provide an in-depth examination of haunted characters in a small Ohio town (perhaps the modern version of Winesburg), Ohio approaches the status of masterpiece.

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