After the Parade

July 6, 2015
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.

July 1, 2015

In Ostlund's debut novel, following her multiaward-winning collection The Bigness of the World, it's clear that Aaron has always been lonely. When we first meet him, he has just finished packing a U-Haul for a move to San Francisco, leaving long-term partner Walter with little more than a list of personal items to announce his departure. Clearly, he's not good at goodbyes. The parade of the title, which changed Aaron's life at age five, was an ordinary event with fire trucks and Shriners on bicycles until his abusive father fell off a float and died instantly. Not long after the funeral Aaron relocates with his mother to a small Minnesota community, where she takes over the local diner. For a while they live quiet if isolated lives, though Aaron isn't popular and remains an outsider. Then, as a teenager, he meets Walter on a fishing trip and after graduating from high school leaves town with him to attend college. VERDICT A thread of melancholy runs through this affecting novel, which alternates chapter by chapter between past and present. At its heart, it's about Aaron discovering his independence and learning who he is when there is no one else to define him. Recommended for all fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

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