Downtown Owl: A Novel - Chuck Klosterman

I love reading Chuck. My love for Chuck began with Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. It grew with Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota - a celebration of 80's heavy metal, cover bands, and tribute bands. I ate up Killing Yourself to Live - a book that recounts Chuck's "cross-country death trip" in 2003 to visit the locations of famous rock-star deaths. And then I completely enjoyed Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. This book covers topics as diverse as Billy Joel, Britney Spears, a classic rock cruise with Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon, Goths in Disneyland Day, more tribute bands, and living seven days on an exclusive diet of McDonald's chicken nuggets.

Now, I have read Chuck's latest book, Downtown Owl: A Novel in less than four hours. What an absolutely enjoyable read!

I won't go into the details of the plot, but Chuck touches upon issues of identity - how we are all more alike than we recognize. He uncovers the secrets we keep and how - even after a lifetime - sometimes we don't even know ourselves. He identifies how we tend to miscommunicate and completely miss each other in discussions. He laments how we are often wrong about what we think we can do, or who we really are. And he grieves over how our failures often define us more than our accomplishments: "We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others. We are what we cannot do" (261).

Chuck also identifies that the way the public remembers the past - and creates heroes and villains - is rarely how things really are. This was a great book by one of my favorite authors!