Synopsis
Winner of the 1993 Pirates Alley William Faulkner Prize, a haunting first novel is actually two stories--Arty's account of his family's breakup and the life and death of Annie Marchand, a young woman he adored as a child.
Reviews
The lives of two small-town Pennsylvania families connected by tragedy are related in this assured and affecting first novel by the author of the short-story collection, In the Walled City. Narrator Arthur Parkinson has been haunted by the murder of his former baby sitter, Annie Marchand, which occured when he was in high school. As he relates the circumstances leading to Annie's death-the culmination of a string of rash and heedless acts that included leaving her husband, engaging in an affair with her best friend's boyfriend and proving negligent in the care of her young daughter-Artie also chronicles his own parents' acrimonious separation, which occurred during those same dreary months of 1974. Annie's decision not to reconcile with her wimpish husband, Glenn, who loves her devotedly and doggedly, is paralleled by Artie's mother's decision to divorce his father, the beginning of the family's downward economic slide. Both sets of adults behave like adolescents, and the effects on their children are grave and irrevocable. O'Nan is a skilled writer who views the lives of his working-class characters with unsentimental compassion; he understands how they are entrapped by social background and stark economics as well as their own personal inadequacies-in Annie's case, her impetuous reactions and fierce temper. The novel's elegiac tone is perfectly controlled, and angst and the lingo of male adolescence are rendered with wry fidelity. But O'Nan's triumph is Annie; in spite of her faults, readers will empathize as she makes the mistakes that will bring her heartbreaking life to an end. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Arty Parkinson, the protagonist of this fine first novel, returns one Christmas to his hometown of Butler, Pennsylvania, to confront his haunting past-specifically, the winter of 1974, when he turned 15 and two terrible things happened: his family fell apart, and Annie Marchand, the young neighbor who had once been his baby-sitter, was murdered. O'Nan (In the Walled City, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1993) weaves together these seemingly disparate small-town tragedies-one narrated in the first person, the other in the third-with consummate skill, seamlessly shifting the focus among characters he wishes to make the reader care about. This winner of the 1993 Pirates Alley William Faulkner Prize for the Novel is recommended for fiction collections.
David Sowd, formerly with Stark Cty. District Lib., Canton, Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
First-time novelist O'Nan has already won awards for his short stories as well as for this beautifully composed and deeply felt tale of domestic tragedy. Snow Angels follows the disintegration of two households in a small western Pennsylvania town in the dead of winter. One is Arthur Parkinson's. Arthur, small yet wise for his 15 years, is coping with his parents' divorce and the loss of their home. While he picks his way through the emotional land mine his parents have created, Arthur falls in love, learns to drive, and, strangely enough, gets drawn into the wreck of his former baby-sitter's life. As a child, Arthur adored Annie for her long red hair and joshing indulgences. Now he can't believe the sickening irony of having to be the one person out of dozens of searchers who finds the body of her drowned three-year-old daughter. Arthur's narrative alternates with the sad tale of Annie's busted marriage, the mental breakdown of her estranged husband, and her inevitable murder. O'Nan tells this sorrowful tale without a shred of sensationalism, ushering us quietly into the squeezed hearts of his characters, respectful of their traumas and awed by how limited our choices in life truly are. Donna Seaman
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