THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412210201
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
SNOW ANGELS
STEWART O'NAN
Doubleday. 305 pp. $20.
BUTLER, PA., isn't far from Pittsburgh, as the crow flies. But the Alleghenies act as a natural Great Wall, shutting out sophisticated culture and high-tech violence.
Cavernous homes of boom-time millionaires still stand; some list in their steep-sloped, weedy yards like rotten teeth in a neglected jaw. Most residents prefer old company housing or cheap new apartments they can afford to heat. Some cling to minimum-wage jobs; others are outright poor. Steep-curved roads gouged painfully up the hills enforce economic isolation and encourage preoccupation with the doings of nearby neighbors.
In 1974, Butler is calm on the surface; domestic violence and drunkenness just unfortunate facts of life. But this dull, nonreflective surface conceals one act that has pushed past the bounds of weary condemnation straight into the evening news.
This tragedy is at the heart of Stewart O'Nan's first novel, Snow Angels. But he focuses on seemingly unremarkable events preceding it, in telling the story of two families disintegrating into divorce.
It opens at a snowy after-school band practice with Arthur Parkinson narrating: ``I was in the band the fall my father left, in the second row of trombones, in the middle because I was a freshman.'' The band runs, slides, falls on frost-slick grass, practicing a halftime maneuver resembling a whirling funnel (the school's nickname is the Golden Tornadoes). They can't get it right, disappointing their band teacher once again. But nearby gunshots interrupt his chastising speech: ``The band turned to them in unison, something Mr. Chervenick could never get us to do.''
It's too late in the day for hunting; the land is posted. Chervenick sprints for the phone, and Arthur, looking back, says: ``What we heard was someone being murdered, someone most of us knew. . . Her name was Annie Marchand, and I knew her first - years before this - merely as Annie the babysitter. . . Annie with her purse and her schoolbooks, ready to whip me at Candyland.''
Arthur's chapters alternate with the third-person account of grown-up Annie Marchand, her estranged husband Glenn, their 3-year-old daughter Tara and Brock, the boyfriend Annie purloined from her best friend.
Arthur's parents are also breaking up, a wrenching, ugly process. Arthur struggles to understand, or at least ignore, the strange whims of changed parents. His unlikely romance with a prim classmate (``She dresses like Mr. Rogers,'' taunts his best friend) becomes the focus of his life. Exploring tormented relationships inside marriage and out, O'Nan concludes that certain people mix like a home recipe for nitroglycerin, and something - if only ennui - will light the fuse. Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona; such pairings end in disaster.
As a child Arthur idolized Annie the babysitter (``Our daydreams, I admit, included her becoming our mother.''). Yet he's numb to her death at first, partly because of a terrible discovery he made earlier, searching for a missing child. Everything's gone wrong in his 15th year. People and relationships, once broken, cannot be reassembled in the same mold.
The characters of Snow Angels scramble for their allotted span like out-of-sync band members, slipping on frozen ground, breaking bones, breaking trust, rarely getting it right. Most limp off the field for a time, as confused and bewildered as Arthur: ``Even though it was already happening to me, I could not see how I would ever come to hate the people I loved. Yet at the same time I could do nothing to stop it, and that would not change for a very long time.''
Haunting, heartbreaking, darkly funny, O'Nan's novel reminds us that we can't always keep ourselves or loved ones from harm. An unlucky few will always be snow angels, frozen in roles perfected in adolescence, unable to look ahead or learn the maneuvers for survival. Surprised at every fall, they're the least likely to get back on the field, or even to get up at all. MEMO: Lenore Hart, author of the novel ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern
Shore. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket photo by BARRY DAVID MARCUS
Jacekt design by AMY C. KING
by CNB