Stewart O’Nan seems incapable of writing a false line. Whether describing the unimaginable (losing one’s child) or the mundane (losing one’s appetite), his modest sentences crystallize the lives of ordinary people. His previous novel, “Emily, Alone,” described the daily outings of an 80-year-old widow in Pittsburgh. Emily’s pulse beat stronger than her story, but with all the novel’s insight and charm, that lack of action didn’t matter. O’Nan is an author you learn to trust, no matter what he’s writing about.
“The Odds” is another in his growing body of distinctly trim books. He can write long — “Wish You Were Here” was too long — but his talent shows off best in these careful miniatures. Once again, he’s given us a story line that seems daringly sparse. Even the opening punches — smuggling cash! highway crash! — immediately give way to the small, plain movements of a middle-aged couple in a hotel room. This willfully anti-dramatic structure succeeds only because O’Nan writes well enough to render the choreography of domestic life as captivating as the drama that usually keeps our attention in fiction. If the thrills are low, the stakes are nonetheless high.
(Viking) - "The Odds: A Love Story," by Stewart O’Nan
We meet just two characters in “The Odds”: Art and Marion Fowler, who have taken a bus from Cleveland to Niagara Falls for “a ridiculous gamble” on Valentine’s Day. While all around them newlyweds revel in newfound bliss and older couples celebrate anniversaries, Art and Marion have booked a top-floor bridal suite for “the final weekend of their marriage,” a cool impersonation of everyone else’s giddiness. Their relationship has all but died under the stress of betrayal, guilt and weariness. (If opposites attract, I can’t help fantasizing about what a perverse coupling this quiet novel would make with Joyce Carol Oates’s modern Gothic “The Falls,” which opens with an overwrought newlywed fleeing the bridal suite and throwing himself into Niagara Falls!)
Laid off from a good job in insurance, buried under $250,000 of debt and about to lose the house, Art is the sad face of our moribund economy. Years of hard work and careful investing weren’t enough to spare him and his wife from the financial crisis. But Art has a plan involving their remaining savings and some cash squeezed from soon-to-be-canceled credit cards. After months of practicing online, he thinks they can hit the jackpot on the roulette wheel in the hotel casino. The fragility of his optimism is wrenching.
What interests O’Nan, though, is the higher-stakes gamble that Art is making to save his marriage, a goal that Marion may no longer share. Treading lightly between husband and wife, the novel captures a distinctly masculine kind of determination and naivete: “His greatest strength was a patient, indomitable hope,” O’Nan writes. “Tonight, with the Falls roaring below their window . . . he would prove that while they’d reached the age where passion sometimes flagged, his love for her was as strong as ever.”
But for Marion, Art’s “indomitable hope” is just one more endearing though exhausting claim on her worn-out heart, something to be endured before returning home and starting over, alone. “She’d convinced herself that the great movements in her life were in the past and succumbed to the inertia of middle age.” Art’s eruptions of optimism are one of the things she won’t miss. “It took so little to encourage him. Did he understand,” she wonders, “how hard it was to believe a word he said?”
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