Ocean State by Stewart O'Nan

Sometimes one of your favorite writers has a book where you love a lot of the writing, love the voices, really appreciate the craft...but still think it's a smaller, less-impressive take on things that writer has done before.

That's where I am today with Stewart O'Nan's 2022 novel Ocean State. He's a fine writer, who does very different things - all vaguely in the literary-novel space, about mostly normal people in a normal world (with a few exceptions) each book. Most recently, I've seen two historicals: West of Sunset, the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last days in Hollywood, and City of Secrets, the story of a Jewish arguably-terrorist in 1945 Jerusalem.

Ocean State, though, reminds me a lot of O'Nan's The Speed Queen, another novel about a murder that starts in the first person with a confession. It also has elements reminiscent of his The Night Country, about teens around Halloween and horrific doings. And, not to give anything away, but I felt that Ocean State has a quieter, flatter ending than it deserved, a slow letting out of tension and flattening of affect when I wanted O'Nan to be heightening affect.

This one starts strongly, as O'Nan often does:

When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.

That's Marie, one of the four viewpoint characters. We get her in first person a few times throughout the book, particularly to open the novel and then again to close it.

All four viewpoints are seen in third person in the bulk of the book, taking turns. There's Marie, her mother Carol, her older sister Angel, and Birdy - the girl that Angel "helped kill."

Their voices are crisp and believable. I dog-eared a bunch of quotes; I usually do that with O'Nan. They inhabit a solid, complex world: working-class Rhode Island, high school and work and the minutia of everyday life. Angel and Birdy are dating the same boy, the rich player Myles - Angel officially, Birdy secretly.

(And how perfect is "Myles" with the Y as a name for that character? O'Nan is always really good at signifiers like that, at illuminating character though small moments and minor details.)

We obviously know from the first line what will happen, and we see it happen. It happens later in the novel than I expected, and more offscreen than I expected. 

I liked all of the stories - all four of the viewpoint characters are strong - without, in the end, thinking that they added up to the same novel. This is a short book, and it's more diffuse than it could be. Maybe I wanted a two-hander, just Angel and Birdy - maybe with something like the afterlife narrator of Night Country. Maybe I wanted a pure first-person account from Marie, what she saw at the time and what she realized later. Either of those, I think, could have been more focused than the four-viewpoint version. This almost feels like four intertwined but separate novellas about the same event, not all of which get to have a climax and dénouement.

But a novel is a long piece of prose with something wrong with it. What's wrong with Ocean State is a little annoying, a little disappointing in the end. But what's right with it is still major and impressive. I still recommend reading O'Nan, but I'd go to Night Country or Speed Queen before this one.