After the Parade

Written over the course of 15 years, Ostlund’s debut novel (after the Flannery O’Connor Award–winning collection The Bigness of the World) follows a broken and empty man who embarks on a six-month journey to make sense of his past, in hopes of comfortably inhabiting his present. After 20 years cradled in the care of the older, stifling Walter, 40-year-old Aaron strikes out from the Midwest for better horizons in San Francisco. Yet when he settles into his new routine—teaching ESL to a ragtag group of foreigners and living in a studio apartment inside a garage owned by a perpetually squabbling couple—he finds it’s as unfulfilling as the one he left behind in New Mexico. On a sentence-by-sentence level, Ostlund’s prose is unmatched—smart, resonant, and imbued with beauty. But the book’s structure doesn’t always support the weight of two dueling stories competing for the reader’s attention—Aaron’s growing pains during his first few months in San Francisco and, via prolonged flashbacks, his difficult childhood in smalltown Minnesota after the accidental death of his father in a parade and the slow deterioration and eventual disappearance of his mother. Still, explorations of each character’s grief and regret, calcified resentment, and gnawing loneliness are vividly rendered. (Sept.)