“After the Parade” delivers a powerful emotional punch from a gifted new voice. On the surface, the book is about Aaron Englund, a gay ESL teacher, who leaves his partner of 20 years and moves to San Francisco. Moving between flashbacks and present day, readers learn about Aaron’s past, as well as his new life in California.

Rather than being driven by plot, this book’s genius is in the strength of its characters – those who appear throughout the entire novel, and those who appear for only a few scenes. Author Lori Ostlund has assembled an unforgetteable cast of well-rounded, believeable people – each with their own stories—seamlessly woven into the larger whole. The novel has a profound sadness to it that I hadn’t expected as most of those we meet, including Aaron, have experienced tragedy, have been bullied, are outcasts, lonely, or somehow on the margins of society. I was surprised at how deeply it moved me. The book was excellent, yet at some points I was feeling the need to chase it with a beach read where the problems are trite and comical and everyone lives happily ever after.

I listened to the audio version of this book (borrowed from the library). The narrator does an excellent job. My only quibble with the audio is that there are several passages that are so beautifully written I would have liked to have had the text to highlight and save them.

4.5 stars.
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fiction (family history drama- main character is gay but plot is not centered on this aspect). This had lots of interesting layers -- different periods of Aaron's life would unravel as the current plotline was developing--but my interest dropped off after a while (so many depressing characters would get introduced--the abusive father who died abruptly in a freak accident, the dwarf whom people can't look in the face, the mother who abandoned Aaron when he was still a teen, the obese cook who got teased and had to drop out of school, and on and on) ( )

This incredible novel of a man's entire forty year span of being treated terribly as a child and feeling worse as an adult should result in such a depressing read that putting it aside it would be a mercy. However, the author is so skilled that the seemingly trivial occurrences in the life of Aaron Englund become totally monumental and revelatory. The build to its apex is so quietly powerful that when the reader finishes, the impulse is to sit with book in hand and perform some deep breathing exercises.

Aaron is the son of a brutish police officer and his beaten down spouse, and the bleakest of small farming communities of Minnesota is completely oppressive until his father dies in a most unusual (yet welcome) manner and his mother abandons him. He is rescued by the kindness of near-strangers and later by an older man, Walter, who comes as a package with a supportive sister. As the novel opens twenty years later, Aaron himself is fleeing from Walter, to San Francisco, as his diary of Walter's intolerable quirks numbers close to fifty. On his car trip west, Aaron himself saves a life and begins his own new life calling a garage home and teaching English to immigrants in a fleabag fly-by-night school. He lurches back through his memories and forward climactically to an unbearably painful reunion with his missing mother. As awful as it all sounds, the superb sentences and Aaron's basic goodness make the novel incredibly satisfying. It's reminiscent of A Prayer For Owen Meany.

Quotes/aphorisms: "He disliked the artistic tendency to put nature into words. He felt that nature spoke sufficiently for itself."

"Everyone on the bus was subdued the way people get when the weather has tricked them."

"What people needed more than sex or love was the reassurance that others wanted to understand them and their fears."

"She told me that when you lose the ability, the desire, to make your life interesting, then maybe it's not worth staying alive anymore."

"People pretend otherwise, but they almost always do what they want to do."

"There isn't always one person who's right and another who's wrong. Sometimes - usually - it's not that easy."

"That was how couples worked, he knew, one always trying to offset the other's behavior."

"We'd laugh, and sometimes we'd have sex because we had that in common: verbal sparring aroused us."

"She had told him once that when she felt stuck, she tried to find the wherewithal to make just one change. If she could do that, sometimes everything else followed."

"Her observation was that he needed to stop giving substance to his guilt." ( )

An object lesson in how to make ordinary life matter to a reader, Lori Ostlund’s first novel, After the Parade, is a symphony of realism, one that turns in movements dramatic and comic, touching and wistful.

Constructed as a vast network of flashbacks, the novel opens with forty-one-year-old ESL teacher Aaron Englund’s departure from New Mexico and the home he has shared with his partner, Walter. Though Aaron’s nominal destination is San Francisco, even before he arrives, we realize his understanding of himself is tenuous, evolving, that this understanding is his real destination.

As Aaron begins his new life, Ostlund flashes back to all that has come before, no event more significant than the day Aaron’s father, a policeman, fell from a parade float and died, leaving Aaron and his mother all alone. In coming to terms with the events of his deep past, Aaron begins to grapple with and understand his recent past with Walter, to lay claim to a better present and future.

One of the most honest, insightful writers you’ll find, there’s never a false sentence in Ostlund’s work, never a reliance on tricks or tropes. Ostlund imbues her characters, especially Aaron, with humanity, humor, and grace, showing us how people really live and grow, day-to-day and year-to-year.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/kbaumeister/2016/07/the-nervous-breakdowns-re...
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I'm surprised that this is a debut novel. She writes like a veteran. This is beautifully written with characters you get to know on an intimate level. The protagonist's loneliness is very relatable. I love her storytelling, which is told in a series of flashbacks, but they're written in a very seamless fashion. I can see this becoming a book club selection. I highly recommend this book! ( )