Snow Angels by Stewart O'Nan

I'm coming to believe that what Stewart O'Nan writes about is death. That's reductive, and I'd have to do a lot of fancy arguments to pull Last Night at the Lobster (it's a franchise that's dying) into the schema, and I suspect the books of his I haven't read might be less death-central. But there are more main-character murderers than you expect from a literary novelist, and he's written novels about morticians in the middle of a plague (A Prayer for the Dying) and a spree killer (The Speed Queen) and a group of ghost teenagers on Halloween (The Night Country) and an arguably-terrorist just before the formation of the state of Israel (City of Secrets).

And O'Nan's most recent book was 2022's Ocean State, whose narrator opens it by saying "When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl."

So I came to his 1994 novel Snow Angels - turned into a 2007 movie I'd missed at the time, which the edition I read features - with a certain set of expectations. (I also should note here that this was his first novel, though that wasn't noticeable in the reading: it's very similar, in themes and language and strength, to everything else I've seen of his.)

It's set in 1974 - there's a slight frame story, which only matters, or is obvious, a couple of times - in the snowy autumn of Butler, Pennsylvania, a small blue-collar city near Pittsburgh. The occasional first-person narrator is Arthur Parkinson, who was fourteen and in the school band at the time. But, like a lot of O'Nan's books (especially Ocean State, so his career is nicely symmetrical right at the moment), it mixes short first-person sections with longer third-person chapters, to tell the stories of a larger group of characters.

Most central is Annie Marchand, who used to be Arthur's babysitter. Her marriage is breaking up, as is Arthur's parents' marriage - to be schematic, that's what this novel is about: how people break up, how they bounce off each other during it, what unforgivable things they can do.

Annie's husband Glenn attempted suicide not too long ago, and has been born again since then; he hopes to get back together with his wife but is still feckless and aimless. Annie's not much better, one of those people ruled by her impulses and prone to lashing out. She works at the local country club as a waitress, alongside her best friend Barb...whose husband Brock she's just started sleeping with. Annie and Glenn have a daughter, Tara, about three years old.

Meanwhile, something similar is going on with Arthur's parents - he never knows the full details, as no one wants to know who else one's parents are fucking - but there was probably some infidelity. His father moves out in the early fall; he and his mother move into a lousy apartment complex to save money. (A minor theme in Snow Angels is the shakiness of living arrangements - people crash on friend's couches, move into what seems to be a storage unit, get stuck in those bad apartments. Unfortunate life decisions lead to worse outcomes, and things can spiral down.)

Snow Angels is a tragedy, in several ways. From the first chapter, we know that Arthur and his whole band heard gunshots, and that was Annie being murdered. There are other deaths, one even more tragic. As usual with O'Nan, even the people who do extreme things are reasonable in their own heads - we don't necessarily agree with or like them, but we understand them more than we want to.

There are a couple of first-novel things about Snow Angels in retrospect, especially the way it's somewhat distanced, set twenty years in the past through a frame story that isn't really important and disappears at the end. But it's still a strong resonant novel about people in complicated messy situations, full of precise language and crisp portraits of those people, and well worth reading.