O'Nan, Stewart 1961-

views updated

O'Nan, Stewart 1961-

(James Coltrane)

PERSONAL: Born February 4, 1961, in Pittsburgh, PA; son of John Lee (an engineer) and Mary Ann (an economist; maiden name, Smith); married Trudy Anne Southwick (a social worker), October 27, 1984; children: Caitlin Elizabeth, Stephen James. Education: Boston University, B.S., 1983; Cornell University, M.F.A., 1992. Politics: "Hopeful." Religion: "See Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever."

ADDRESSES: Agent—David Gernert, Gernert Agency, 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Grumman Aerospace Corp., Bethpage, NY, assistant structural test engineer, 1984–88; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, lecturer in English, 1990–93; University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, artist in residence, 1994–95; Trinity College, Hartford, MA, assistant professor of English, 1995–98. University of New Mexico, summer instructor, 1994; fellow or faculty member at writing conferences; judge of writing competitions.

MEMBER: PEN American Center, Modern Language Association of America, Associated Writing Programs, PEN New England, Cornell Book and Bowl.

AWARDS, HONORS: Ascent Fiction Prize, 1988, for the short story "Econoline"; Columbia Fiction Award, 1989, for the short story "The Third of July"; Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, 1993, for In the Walled City; Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Prize, 1993, and citation for "notable book of the year," American Library Association, 1995, both for Snow Angels; fellow at MacDowell Colony, 1995; named among Granta's best young American novelists, 1996; Oklahoma Book Award, 1996, for The Names of the Dead; citation for "notable book of the year," New York Times, 1998, for A World Away, 1999, for A Prayer for the Dying, and 2002, for Wish You Were Here; award from International Horror Guild, and cited among "twenty-five books to remember," New York Public Library, both 1999, for A Prayer for the Dying; Connecticut Book Awards, 2003, for Wish You Were Here, and 2004, for The Night Country; Martin Luther King Drum Major for Freedom Award, 2006, for The Good Wife.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Snow Angels, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1994.

The Names of the Dead (mystery), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1996.

The Speed Queen, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1997.

A World Away, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 1998.

A Prayer for the Dying, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 1999.

(Under pseudonym James Coltrane) A Good Day to Die, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1999.

Everyday People, Grove Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Wish You Were Here, Grove Press (New York, NY), 2002.

The Night Country, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.

The Good Wife, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author of the novel End of Memory, 1990.

OTHER

Transmission, Arjuna (Colorado Springs, CO), 1987.

In the Walled City (short stories), University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1993.

(Editor) John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, introduction by Charles Johnson, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1994.

(Editor) OK Best, Full Circle (Oklahoma City, OK), 1997.

(Editor) The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War, Anchor (New York, NY), 1998.

The Circus Fire (nonfiction) Doubleday (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Stephen King) Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, Scribner (New York, NY), 2004.

Author of screenplays Angels (based on the novel by Denis Johnson), and The Violent Bear It Away (based on the novel by Flannery O'Connor), both 1994. Work represented in anthologies, including Share Our Strength Anthology, 1998. Contributor of short stories, articles, poetry, and reviews to periodicals, including Ploughshares, Chattahoochee Review, Montana Journalism Review, Boston Review, Whirlwind, Threepenny Review, Kingfisher, Ascent, and Colorado Review. Associate editor, Epoch, 1990–93.

WORK IN PROGRESS: About a Girl, Last Night at the Lobster, to be completed in 2007, and Somewhere over the Rainbow, both novels; 20 Burgers, a short story collection; Going after Cacciato, a screenplay based on a novel by Tim O'Brien; Lie Down in Darkness, a screenplay based on the novel by William Styron; Poe, an original screenplay; Clara, an original screenplay, with Manette Ansay.

SIDELIGHTS: First a prize-winning short fiction author, Stewart O'Nan "[made] the transition to longer fiction gracefully," noted Washington Post Book World contributor Andrea Barrett. Snow Angels, "O'Nan's stunning first novel," wrote Mary Breasted in the New York Times Book Review, "has the sorrowful, soggy texture of realism into which religious symbolism has fallen. The reader is drawn into a landscape that is bleak and miserable but utterly believable." With an impoverished town in western Pennsylvania as its backdrop, the novel centers on two families whose lives "are falling apart" along with their "loosely intertwined" wealth, described Breasted. In the novel, Arthur recalls his troubling 1970s boyhood experiences with parents who divorced and the murder of his former babysitter, Anne. "The braiding of the two stories and the combination of first-person and omniscient voice, make a whole that's much more than the sum of its parts," commented Barrett, adding: "Moving, beautifully constructed, morally complex, this … fine first novel" presents a cast of characters that "allow the novel to flower in unexpected ways." As readers, Barrett concluded, we are powerfully attracted to these "flawed, trapped characters that we come to see them as victims." Breasted noted, however, that "for all its poetic grace, Snow Angels is not a perfectly balanced novel. The author's sympathies are clearly with the male characters."

The Names of The Dead was described by Rand Richards Cooper in the New York Times Book Review as "tak[ing] up both the grim reality of war and the problematic task of communicating that reality" as it focuses on "a 32-year-old baked-goods deliveryman and decorated Vietnam veteran [Larry] who [has flashbacks]." "O'Nan's writing strikes a broad range of notes," according to Cooper, "In the Vietnam sections, it is terse and urgent…. In the postwar passages, it slows down to catch the drifting quality of [the protagonists] bewilderment…. Elsewhere, however, Mr. O'Nan falls into offhand, merely serviceable prose." Cooper cited the book for having "boilerplate stalker" and "high-concept Hollywood" qualities, as well as "truth[s] … cheapened through overuse." In Nation, A.O. Scott called The Names of The Dead "a hectic, crowded and strangely empty novel … lifeless." Scott also said that the "characters never achieve sufficient presence or motive to engage our sympathy or interest." "This is especially disappointing," according to Scott, "because … O'Nan offers glimpses of another approach to telling the story of Vietnam, an alternative to his own cautious and conventional realism." The stories told by Larry's squadron and his self-help group "convey not the literal but the 'moral truth' of the war." Although Washington Post Book World contributor Marc Leep-son acknowledged that the novel at times "over-whelm[s] the reader with seemingly unilluminating detail" and ultimately "mildly disappoints," the critic qualified these flaws as "minor missteps" and commented that The Names of The Dead "comes close to being The Red Badge of Courage of the American war in Vietnam…. Both Crane and O'Nan write brilliantly about wars in which they did not serve decades after those wars ended. That alone is a noteworthy accomplishment."

"While Names is dense, lyrical and brooding," summarized Jay A. Fernandez in a review in the Washington Post Book World, "The Speed Queen is literature on fast forward: truncated, fragmented, edgy, reveling in its manic momentum." "Unfortunately," continued Fernandez, "its depth is negligible compared with the spiraling intensity of The Names of The Dead." The Speed Queen showcases Marjorie, a female death-row inmate on the day of her execution, recording her thoughts and life history. "In Marjorie's high-velocity account of her past, Stewart O'Nan has created an authentic American voice, by turns naive, brutal, pathetic, comic and woefully ignorant," commented Charles Wasserburg in Tribune Books. Calling The Speed Queen "a book about immortality," Wasserburg concluded: "Marjorie lives and dies with no self-discovery, and that, perhaps, is the novel's true, and bleakest, tragedy."

In positive contrast, George Stade described O'Nan and The Speed Queen in the New York Times Book Review: "O'Nan … has in abundance the imaginative sympathy his characters lack." His characters "are vividly realized, and with the most economical of touches. In addition to its exacting art, [The Speed Queen] features an unfailing intelligence, a grim and bracing humor, an unblinking eye for the telling detail. There is a dissonant, hypnotic music in his account of this young woman spending her last day trying to explain herself (and not succeeding), without complaint or resentment or railing against the system." Even though Fernandez believed the novel may be "forgettable," he appreciated O'Nan's "good form—flawless storytelling, laser-like detail, trenchant commentary" and wrote that O'Nan "remains at the front of the contemporary literary pack."

In a major departure from his work as a novelist, O'Nan teamed with best-selling author Stephen King to produce Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. The project began before the season's spring training phase, when the two fans began to exchange e-mail messages about the baseball team that had not won a World Series pennant since 1918. The messages escalated in intensity along with the team's surprising achievements, culminating in the delirium of impossible dreams come true. The authors are not writing for the general reader, as People contributor Kyle Smith pointed out, but for the diehard Red Sox fans who already know the players, the ball park, and the opposition. Still, as a Publishers Weekly contributor observed, no other account "will have this book's warmth, personality or depth." Faithful "evokes smiles or shudders of remembrance all the way to the season's improbable finish," wrote Nathan Ward in the Library Journal, as recorded by two unquestionably literate chroniclers and, as evidenced by their ebullient commentary, devoted fans. Smith likened Faithful to "a sweet romance: You can barely stop yourself from skipping ahead to the happy ending."

Stewart O'Nan once told CA: "In my fiction and in the screenwriting projects I take on, I seem to have a strange and absolute religious vision of America as it is. I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in—yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental. My characters are lonely people who have a real need to believe; the struggle between faith and doubt produces either heartening victories (as in Cheever) or horrifying defeats (Flannery O'Connor, Robert Stone). The work is often ugly and unsettling due to this extreme split between hope and despair. It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, 'humane.'"

More recently O'Nan added: "Looking back after ten books or so, I'm tempted to say my work continues to deal with catastrophes, both large and small, and family, and memory. In the later work, I hope I'm guided by the William Maxwell of So Long, See You Tomorrow and the early-to-middle Alice Munro. I'm still drawn to characters who are mostly overlooked (both in contemporary fiction and in life) and who would have little or nothing to say if asked for an opinion. In that sense, I guess I'm a provincial novelist, concerned with the collision between extreme events and regular, everyday life. While my style tends to be a lucid realism, I will bend it (as well as the form or organization of a book) into any shape I have to in order to deliver the emotional world of my characters."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of Snow Angels, p. 402; January 1, 1996, Nancy Pearl, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 792; March 15, 1996, review of Snow Angels, p. 1272; April 1, 1997, Deanna Larson, review of The Speed Queen, p. 1282.

Books and Culture, September, 1996, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 9.

Choice, June, 1994, E.S. Nelson, review of In the Walled City, p. 1581.

Entertainment Weekly, April 25, 1997, Megan Harlan, review of The Speed Queen, p. 64.

Georgia Review, summer, 1995, Erin McGraw, review of In the Walled City, p. 537.

Guardian Weekly, February 19, 1995, review of Snow Angels, p. 20.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1994, review of Snow Angels, p. 1156; December 15, 1995, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 1724; January 15, 1997, review of The Speed Queen, p. 89.

Kliatt, May, 1996, review of Snow Angels, p. 10.

Library Journal, October 15, 1994, David Sowd, review of Snow Angels, p. 88; March 15, 1995, review of Snow Angels, p. 41; March 1, 1996, Edward B. St. John, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 106; February 1, 1997, Adam Mazmanian, review of The Speed Queen, p. 107; December 1, 2004, Nathan Ward, review of Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, p. 126.

Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1994, review of Snow Angels, p. 6.

Nation, April 22, 1996, A.O. Scott, review of The Names of the Dead, pp. 34-35.

New York Times Book Review, March 27, 1994, Brooke Allen, review of On Writers and Writing, p. 26; January 8, 1995, Mary Breasted, review of Snow Angels, p. 29; December 31, 1995, review of Snow Angels, p. 16; April 7, 1996, Rand Richards Cooper, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 18; May 11, 1997, George Stade, review of The Speed Queen, p. 28.

People, May 5, 1997, Pam Lambert, review of The Speed Queen, p. 33; December 13, 2004, Kyle Smith, review of Faithful, p. 53.

Publishers Weekly, February 28, 1994, review of On Writers and Writing, p. 65; September 12, 1994, review of Snow Angels, p. 79; January 22, 1996, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 58; January 20, 1997, review of The Speed Queen, p. 391; March 17, 1997, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 81; April 13, 1998, pp. 47-48; November 29, 2004, review of Faithful, p. 32.

Sewanee Review, July, 1996, Robert Benson, review of Snow Angels, p. R59.

Studies in Short Fiction, winter, 1995, Ron Tanner, review of In the Walled City, p. 101.

Time, November 14, 1994, John Skow, review of Snow Angels, p. 97.

Times Literary Supplement, December 5, 1997, review of The Speed Queen, p. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 6, 1997, Charles Wasserburg, review of The Speed Queen, p. 5; April 27, 1997, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 8.

Vogue, December, 1994, Jennifer Pierce, review of Snow Angels, p. 216.

Washington Post Book World, January 29, 1995, Andrea Barrett, review of Snow Angels, p. 8; April 21, 1996, Marc Leepson, review of The Names of the Dead, p. 9; July 27, 1997, Jay A. Fernandez, review of The Speed Queen, pp. 4-5.