Readings

Everyday People

Grove Press, 295 pp., $24

We desperately want to believe our own “feel-good bullshit” about race and progress in America, novelist Stewart O’Nan says in his starkly tender new novel, Everyday People. We speak to ourselves in resonant, hopeful, PBS-station tones of the “dreams of a people that can’t be denied,” but in fact we only celebrate the emblematic dreams, the socially agreed upon, the easily digestible. The dreams of everyday people, those who burden and carry one another through the day, are sandblasted away like graffiti. Stewart O’Nan’s novel is bent on reclaiming them.

O’Nan walks us through Pittsburgh’s mostly black and impoverished East Liberty neighborhood, which is being cut off from the rest of Pittsburgh by a bus expressway. While most white writers would shy from this territory for fear of getting it wrong, O’Nan risks it all. As a result, the people of East Liberty, even the minor characters, have a remarkable dignity and singularity. Chris, a wheelchair-bound graffiti artist, suffers from survivor’s guilt after a recent accident that took the use of his legs and his best friend’s life. He spends time brooding over his ex-girlfriend, their child, the dead best friend, his suddenly born-again Christian brother, and — what else? — Star Trek Voyager. Miss Fisk, the grandmother of the dead friend, like many characters in the book, struggles to put some semblance of a life together in the aftermath of the unthinkable. In a heartbreaking and belated telephone conversation with the dead boy’s absent mother, Miss Fisk asks if she would agree to donate his organs, though the surgeons have already taken them:

“Baby,” [Miss Fisk] said, “they asked me if Benny would want to help some other people.”

She waited, but Yvonne just clicked [her nails], went mmm-hmm.

“They said his insides were fine.”

“They wanted him to donate his organs,” Yvonne said, making it plain.

“I said I’d have to talk to you.”

“I’d think he’d want to help other people.”

“Oh, good,” Miss Fisk said, “Oh thank goodness.”

“What?” she came back fast. “What? You didn’t say they could, did you?”

“Now wait a minute,” Miss Fisk said, but it was too late for that, and she knew that would stand between them for the rest of her life.

O’Nan’s characters know there is a price to be paid for their choices, even if the choices are compassionate ones, and often the price is loneliness.

The book’s most interesting (and perhaps loneliest) character is Chris’ fiftyish father, Harold, who has kept his desires for other men a secret all of his life. But after falling for a younger man, Dre, he finds himself caught between his intense desires and his obligations to his family, his everyday burdens. The relationship between the two men is evoked tenderly, but O’Nan doesn’t turn away from the selfishness and cruelty sometimes inherent in secretive, highly charged relationships.

Like the best and most lasting novels, Everyday People evokes a whole world by walking only a few blocks. If offers no easy truths. It hints, in a way, that all dreams are denied in the end because they are paired with a world that can’t support them. But there’s an awkward strength even in defeat, even in death, if you’re paying attention, O’Nan seems to say. When Chris is looking over the crowd at church, he thinks about what to memorialize in one of his paintings: “[He] doesn’t see anyone famous here, no Julien Bonds, or … Paul Robesons, just folks, everyday people. But that’s next. First the dead, then the living. Got to know what you lost to know what you got.”

This article appears in March 9 • 2001.