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Fiction

‘Ohio’ as the Locus of 21st-Century Rust Belt Despair

Stephen MarkleyCredit...Michael Amico

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OHIO
By Stephen Markley
484 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27

Graduates’ young heads are full of anticipation: What will we become? How will our friends turn out? Will we be the voice of our generation? It may be that our imaginations burn brightest at these gateway junctures, latching onto ideas about ourselves that prove difficult to ever let loose.

So, naturally, a class reunion is an irresistibly juicy narrative device for writers. The trope can take many forms, whether set at an actual alumni gathering, as in Mary Higgins Clark’s “Nighttime Is My Time”; or applied more loosely, as in Hanya Yanagihara’s ensemble bildungsroman “A Little Life.” Still, the cruel pleasures are the same: We get to see how those teenage hopes have played out in adulthood.

For the characters in Stephen Markley’s first novel, “Ohio,” the future has not exactly gone according to plan. Set in the imaginary Ohio town of New Canaan — which serves as a microcosm for all that has gone wrong with Middle America this century — the story focuses on 10 members of the high school class of 2003 whose youthful friendships and various romantic entanglements still haunt them a decade later. Once they were the popular kids, celebrities of their small-town Rust Belt universe, but time has not been kind to them as they close in on their 30s, and in fact a few of them haven’t survived to see 29.

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The book begins with the funeral of a former football hero and soldier killed in Iraq. Shortly thereafter, another in the group dies of a drug overdose in Los Angeles, and the remaining eight either drift apart or lose touch altogether. But one night in the summer of 2013 the surviving members of the clique come together again, by sheer coincidence, back in New Canaan. The crew satisfies all the American High School Archetypes we know so well: the boorish football jock, the conniving mean girl, the smarmy prepster, the Christian athlete who discovers she might be gay, the opinionated jackass, the innocent, puzzled beauty. But they are never simply stereotypes.

The majority of the novel takes place over a single period of roughly 12 hours wherein secrets are revealed, betrayals unveiled, terrible choices made, regrets experienced. This sounds cornier than it is. Their convergence is a contrivance, but it allows Markley to do some enormously clever things with the structure of the book, essentially composed of four novellas, each focusing on a different character with his or her own purpose for returning home. The reader witnesses the same night from distinct, and often conflicting, perspectives, which creates a beautifully layered, “Rashomon”-like effect in which threads left dangling at the end of one section are picked up in the next, and casual details suddenly take on new, surprising significance. There’s a real pleasure in this hopscotching narrative: With each new point of view, a clearer sense of the hidden story emerges as the reader slowly pieces together some shocking revelations.

But Markley clearly has more on his mind than a tightly wound plot. This book wears its significance on its sleeve, showering its characters in hot-button issues of the past dozen years, including opiate addiction, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamophobia, fracking, the Occupy movement, alt-right militias, self-harm, sexual exploitation and politicized rage. The novel churns with such ambitious social statements and insights that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid. Nearly every character delivers a speech that wouldn’t feel out of place on “Rachel Maddow” or “Tucker Carlson,” and occasionally an omniscient narrator interrupts to explain the broader implications of, for example, the 2008 housing crisis. “Bill had never actually met a person to whom he did not enjoy ranting,” one character observes, astutely.

“Ohio” would have been a better novel with less of this explication. The most moving parts of the book are those that step back and let the events and the actions speak for themselves, as when one character (the shy, bookish one from high school) recalls his three tours in Afghanistan. The beautifully precise details are all the more vivid for their lack of accompanying commentary.

The real core of this earnestly ambitious debut lies not in its sweeping statements but in its smaller moments, in its respectful and bighearted renderings of damaged and thwarted lives. It’s the human scale that most descriptively reveals the truth about the world we’re living in.

Dan Chaon is the author, most recently, of “Ill Will.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Rust Belt Despair. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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