wordaholicky attempt at GAN ( )

I was drawn to read Ohio by Stephen Markley because I grew up in Ohio. The simple title of the novel had me feeling nostalgic and intrigued. Set in New Canaan, four former classmates return home on the same day in 2013, with a purpose. New Canaan is a small town impacted by a recession, opioid epidemic, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story is told from the perspective of each main character. First is Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic and drug abuser who has traveled the world and is delivering a package to New Canaan. Next is Stacey Moore, a doctoral student who returns to meet with her former lover’s mother. Then, we meet Dan Eaton who is a military veteran. He returns home to have dinner with a former high school girlfriend. Lastly, is Tina Ross, former girlfriend of the high school football quarterback. The reason for her return is completely sinister.

I feel like I have had a strange relationship with this novel. Initially, I struggled to connect with the book. I didn’t feel grounded, as though I had a good understanding of what was happening and where this story was taking me. I contemplated pressing pause and trying again at another time. As I continued listening, I began vacillating between being drawn into Bill Ashcraft’s story and being disinterested and bored. As soon as Stacey Moore’s story began, my interest was piqued, and the book had my full attention until the end.

Interesting how our high school years are truly so formative and how naïve we are to that fact at the time. The relationships we develop and later lose, the successes, and the tragedies are what really shape us for adulthood. The classroom learning is so insignificant and forgettable compared to the real-life lessons we learn through our experiences. The conclusion of this novel left me a bit paralyzed; needing time to process and decipher my thoughts about it. This is a book I struggled to connect with in the beginning and as I neared the end, I knew I was going go miss these characters. It’s a heavy read with a lot of graphic descriptors that convey the shocking realities for these four traumatized characters. Author Stephen Markley is an incredible writer. The way he describes scenes and expresses the characters’ emotions just exudes amazing talent.

I’m glad I read this book. In fact, I kind of want to read it again. Knowing what I know now, I may have a different perception of Bill’s story. There are many other characters intertwined with the four main characters and I got confused several times. I think a re-read would help me better grasp some connections I likely missed.

I purchased the audiobook from Audible. The large cast of narrators was a perfect fit for the structure of the story. Each character has a different narrator, which includes Caitlin Davies, Jayme Mattler, Joy Osmanski, Jonathan Todd Ross, Corey Bill, and Gibson Frazier.

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A Book And A Dog ( )

I wanted to like this book, but didn’t. The writing felt rushed and goal-driven, like I was being constantly shoved forward to the next plot point or flashback or oooooh foreshadowing, instead of helping me to know the characters and understand the story through them. The four leads ended up seeming rather simplistic, like four pinball flippers kicking the plot around.
Small errors in detail early on (like calling it the DMV when Ohio calls it the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, or, really, suggesting that a town full of pickup truck drivers wouldn’t have tied down the flag draped across the coffin) should have been a warning — specificity matters, details tell the story, and if I’m being honest I felt the author’s disdain for the semi-real place he’s using to set his story. ( )

I see the world that’s coming. The future we’re being banished to.

Stephen Markley’s Ohio doesn’t care if it doesn’t grip you in the opening pages; in fact, it doesn’t even care if it doesn’t grip you until you’re midway through the novel. After about 100-or-so pages, the reader gets pulled into the rhythm—finally—only to find that Markley has decided to change gears and switch abruptly to another character’s story, using deep focus for each of the four throughout.

It’s this jarring ebb and flow, this slow settling in and then a sudden dislocation, as if the floor has been ripped out from under you, that really makes Ohio’s structure, pace, and stark violence echo its main concern: America today. It also serves to drive home the novel’s central, iterative question: how did we get to this point?

In 2013, four late-twenty-somethings descend on their hometown in the Rust Belt—a setting Markley chooses purposefully as the disheartened and desperate voted for Trump just years later—and, despite some of them converging and some of them not converging, each of the four characters’ journeys back to New Canaan, Ohio cause them to confront their own formative years, friendships, and myriad rifts: political, romantic, familial, and otherwise.

The blurb is as good a summary as I would recommend before beginning Ohio: knowing too much will ruin just how intricately Markley has connected the various narratives and threads of the novel, and the reader’s pleasure when this does occur. Needless to say, Ohio is an angry, passionate, heartbreaking book—about the state of America; about working-class hopelessness; addiction; PTSD and wars that never end; the rage against the powers-that-be; and an ever-mounting sense of seething, violence that threatens to break through the surface, hitting the reader slowly and skillfully as Markley builds his pretty massive 500-page novel toward its climax (a climax not without its flaws, but still beautifully executed for a debut novel, hence the 4.5 stars).

This is one of the most impressive and important debut novels of this new era of ours, and its dissection of America today—and how we got here, and how the past is always informing our present, no matter who we are—is as shocking as it is truthful, as devastating as it is almost cosmological.

4.5 stars ( )

I think you have to be older/ wiser/ more cynical to like this book. And like probably isn’t the right word, maybe appreciate it is a better choice.
This book is not a uplifting experience by any means. The title could easily have been Ohio- the death of the American Dream.
Everything that the government and business and people have done wrong in the last 50 years is on display in the town in Ohio where this book takes place. Jobs shifted overseas, Walmart’s and chain stores putting the little guy out of business, painkiller and heroin addiction running rampant, pseudo patriotism,
It’s all here.
The book is really more like 4 novellas that are sort of tied together and the prologue helps to set many of the stories in motion.
What made this book difficult in the beginning is the way the story is told, but if you stick with it, you will be rewarded. It is like taking the writing styles (and I do mean styles as the original Authors truly stand alone) of James Lee Burke, Hunter S Thompson, and Irvine Welsh and blending them together.
This book is definitely not for everyone, but I definitely am glad I read it.
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