Snow Angels / by Stewart O'Nan

Born in Pittsburgh in 1961, Stewart O'Nan graduated with a B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from Boston University and nearly a decade working and teaching in the field prior to taking up writing at the prodding of his wife. Although he's been a successful novelist in the years since he began writing, perhaps his most notable accomplishment was the book Faithful, based on the World Series run of the 2004 Boston Red Sox he penned along with Stephen King. O'Nan would call the effort "the luckiest thing I've ever done". His first novel Snow Angels, published in 1994 to great applause, follows a Pennsylvania teenager who's parents are in the process of getting a divorce.

In 1974, Arthur Parkinson is fourteen years old and not exactly enjoying life. Along with having to grow up in a generally dreary Pennsylvania town, Arthur is currently witnessing the disintegration of his parents's marriage. His father's moved out of the house and in with a new girlfriend and his mom just can't seem to handle it. Not that he's especially close to them in the first place. On more than one occasion, they seem to completely forget about Arthur, failing to pick him up from school or at his part-time job then arguing between them over who's fault it was. His job isn't so bad actually. He gets to work with Annie, his former babysitter and lifelong crush, who's a good friend even though she's married with a small child. Unknown to Arthur, however, is that everything's not quite OK for Annie at the moment. Her husband Glenn, her high school crush, is mentally unstable and has a bit of a drinking problem. Recently just out of a psychiatric hospital and currently living with his parents, Glenn wants to see the couple's daughter Tara more and even patch things up with Annie who, unbeknownst to anyone, is having an affair with the husband of a co-worker. It doesn't take too long for the pot to boil over and everything to become one big mess. When Tara goes missing one afternoon, all hell breaks loose with Glenn a suspect and the whole town set out to search for the missing girl. And that's when Arthur makes the discovery that will change everything.

Snow Angels is eerily similar to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm (FIC MOODY), a book later made into an award-winning film by Ang Lee starring Kevin Kline and Elijah Wood. Both were published in 1994, both are set in the 1970's, take place amidst obvious winter weather in the northeastern US and they both feature high domestic drama of a tragic nature. And still there's more. Each offer the same sort of intersecting family crises involving adults and infidelity cross cut by curious adolescents engaged in early relationships. In all factuality, this seems merely a coincidence with no real recognition of the fact other than a fledgling article about both books being a sort of Yuppie fiction. The style and narrative of Snow Angels is a little different from Ice Storm. Alternating chapters present Arthur in the first person and then the Marchand clan in omniscient third person. It's not something you see a lot of books and on the whole it works OK; if there's a problem with the novel it's not the prose. It's the way the intended character intersection doesn't quite make it. The circumstances don't really meet and it's more a case of two individual stories than one well integrated plot. Snow Angels is also a 2007 movie starring Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell which has received generally favorable reviews. (FIC O'NAN)

All The Right Moves (DVD) 1983 / a film by Michael Chapman; starring Tom Cruise, Craig T. Nelson and Lea Thompson

For 18-year-old Stefan "Stef" Djordjevick, the only way to escape his bleak Pennsylvania steel town is with a football scholarship. A star defensive back on his high school team, he knows that each game, each performance is critical to the rest of his life. Stef's not the only one who wants out. Everyone including his girlfriend wants to escape their grim surroundings and the inevitably dismal future which comes with it. Even Stef's head coach, the gutsy but verbally abusive Coach Nickerson dreams of riding his winning team to a championship and hopefully a much better position ("somewhere far away") as an assistant in college. The night of the defining game holds high stakes, higher still when things don't go right and the tension between Stef and Coach Nickerson becomes hostile to a point where both their plans and dreams come crashing to a hault.

Right from the start, this movie makes one thing unavoidably clear: there's a mill, and it's not an all that happy-fun place to work. Like the wide-screen close-up of a frozen Jack Nicholson revealed in Kubrick's The Shining, the steel mill is brought abruptly to viewer attention in the film's opening shot. There is nothing even remotely good about the mill. Absolutely everything, every devastatingly sad element of the town from its name, Ampipe, dubbed after the "American Steel & Pipe" company, right down to the drab homes of the workers emanates from the tomb-like structure atop the hill.  No one is left unscarred by its grim (and grimey) presence, from the miserable workers who trudge up the hill every morning to the even more miserable workers who are laid off daily and the multitudes of dependents and non-workers who, like Stef, plod through lives of quiet desperation. Consequently there are no smiling faces in Ampipe, only the leering, hungover scowls of men and the vacant stares of defeated women. The one outlet (other than alcohol) available to the people of Ampipe is also something toxic, as corrupting and pestilential within itself as the pollution spewing from the smoke stacks. Given to living vicariously through the lives of 17 and 18-year-olds, the entire town exists in a sort of emotional vacuum where a stumble here or a miscall there defines far more than collective misfortune. It proliferates a system which necessitates bitter personal conflicts, distorts the truth, neglects higher priorities and fosters evil intentions. The individual opportunities created stand as the lone redeeming element. That the theme of dead-end industrial commerce within a small, rural community is relentlessy driven home for viewer enlightenment is probably a good thing because nothing else in the movie is very significant. As a film All The Right Moves is, well, kind of dumb. Cliche, cliche, cliche--it goes without saying. It's a little embarassing watching Tom Cruise, who looks so ridiculously out-of-place that comparisons to Rudy will inevitably get thrown around by viewers who've only seen the latter, and even the always effervescent Lea Thompson seems badly miscast as the dowdy, enabling girlfriend whose own passions for music are cruelly overlooked. But the movie's so dated it entertains with its camp value, maintaining a kitsch effect popular with 80's movies these days, much of it do to the lamentably tacky (funny in an ironic way) teen aphorisms and awkward slang strewn throughout the dialogue. Plus, like so many bad books and movies, the cover art is noticeably good. (DVD ALL) 

Coal Run / by Tawni O'Dell

There isn't much to Coal Run. It's always been a thoroughly forgettable place. Even back during its relatively prosperous days, and even before a mine explosion killed 96 men (half the entire male population), it was just another dying Pennsylvania coal town. But a generation later, the fierce pride of its people still resonates even as the physical evidence of wrecked lives and abandoned homes can kill the mood of observers. In its citizens, nearly all still feeling the effects of the disaster, flickers of the hardworking, blue collar spirit are still alive, it's women and (remaining) men holding on to what's left. This mentality of hardscrabble gumption is something Ivan Zoshchenko knows well as anyone. A former gridiron legend who left the town for further glory, the man known by all as "The Great Ivan Z" is back home after almost 20 years of drifting nomadically from one place to another. A sheriff's deputy, he now spends his days dealing with domestic disputes and high strung rednecks in a job--the only one he could get--which at least leaves his nights free to drink away his sorrows.

Anyway, it's the more personal matters that seem to occupy his time these days. With his father killed in the explosion, the only remaining family Ivan has are his stubborn mother, a hospital administrator still suppressing the past, and his staunchly independent sister, a single mom who despite her squalid living conditions, won't take any help from Ivan or her ex and never misses an opportunity to rail against the men in her life. There's also a little matter concerning two people he was once very close to--a friend and old girlfriend with whom he's lost touch. Only days away is the prison release of Reese Raynor, a onetime friend and teammate who's been serving time for beating his wife, (Ivan's ex) Crystal, into a coma. It's got Ivan thinking about the past more than ever and, as the release date lingers, he feels compelled to confront Reese, about his wife, sure, but also about a long-ago hidden secret the two men share and a regretful past that binds them both to the town.

O'Dell grounds her story in a starkly familiar world which no one will have difficulty engaging. Even readers who have no connection to the region and are unacquainted with the plight of its people, Coal Run communicates a common theme of grief, loss and regret with frightening realism. And while the character of Ivan, a figure mirroring the town's plight perfectly, can seem a bit unoriginal (the fallen athletic hero forced to come to terms with his shattered dreams) and O'Dell has a tendency to distort or oversentimentalize about his suffering, it's a story which moves along well enough. The book isn't really about individuals anyway. It's more of an acutely realistic case study of how past mistakes can reverberate, of how tragedy sometimes marks its survivors more than its victims and how the despair of dead-end lives exists right here in America, something which, as O'Dell tells it, is a story worth hearing. (FIC ODELL)