belt magazine – The Works of Stewart O'Nan

Stewart O’Nan is the kind of writer who can get his readers to care about the closing of a chain seafood restaurant in a run-down mall in the middle of America. In his best-selling novel Last Night at the Lobster, Manny DeLeon, who manages the doomed dining establishment, starts his last shift like a general anticipating a battle he knows he will lose. DeLeon is still devoted to his job and feels responsible for failing his troops, though he is weary after so many years in the trenches. There will be casualties, the few survivors will be transferred to the nearby Olive Garden, but others will simply fade into a suburban oblivion when the Red Lobster locks its doors for the final time. Resonating with quotidian disappointment, we still end up hoping that the restaurant might stay open, and that his characters aren’t forgotten.

In O’Nan’s latest novel, Evensong, we become reacquainted with characters from O’Nan’s previous Pittsburgh novels even though years have passed. Not everyone, of course – O’Nan has written 19 books – but it’s as if we have unexpectedly run into an old colleague or friend, and time is suddenly catching up with us as well.

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From an interview in Belt Magazine:

When time enough has passed for critics to start assessing how the Great Recession played out in American literature, it’s likely they’ll take a close look at Stewart O’Nan’s recent novels, especially 2007’s Last Night at the Lobster and 2011’s Emily, Alone. That’s partly because, dispiritingly enough, the shelf of novels that address the lower rungs of the middle class is a small one. But even in a crowded field, O’Nan’s books would stand out. In Lobster, O’Nan delivers both a close study of Manny, the manager of a soon-to-close Connecticut Red Lobster franchise, and of the workers and patrons who share their lives inside it during one day, captive to a brutal snowstorm. It’s early, but the novella is one of the most potent and sharpest portraits of work in the new century—few books in any era have done such a fine job of exploring how corporations stoke our loyalty, and how easily they betray it.

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