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Overview
Now a major motion picture from Warner Independent starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale
In Stewart O'Nan's Snow Angels, Arthur Parkinson is fourteen during the dreary winter of 1974. Enduring the pain of his parents' divorce, his world is shattered when his beloved former babysitter, Annie, falls victim to a tragic series of events. The interlinking stories of Arthur's unraveling family, and of Annie's fate, form the backdrop of this intimate tale about the price of love and belonging, told in a spare, translucent, and unexpectedly tender voice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312427696 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2008 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Avon, CTDate of Birth:
February 4, 1961Place of Birth:
Pittsburgh, PAEducation:
B.S., Aerospace Engineering, Boston University, 1983; M.F.A., Cornell University, 1992Website:
http://www.stewart-onan.comRead an Excerpt
Snow Angels
A NovelBy Stewart O'Nan
Picador
Copyright © 2008 Stewart O'NanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312427696
ONE
I WAS IN THE BAND the fall my father left, in the second row of trombones, in the middle because I was a freshman. Tuesdays and Wednesdays after school we practiced in the music room, but on Fridays Mr. Chervenick led us outside in our down jackets and tasseled Steeler hats and shitkicker boots and across the footbridge that spanned the interstate to the middle school soccer field, where, like the football team itself, we ran square-outs and curls and a maneuver Mr. Chervenick called an oblique, with which, for the finale of every halftime show, we described—all 122 of us—a whirling funnel approximating our school’s nickname, the Golden Tornadoes. We never got it quite right, though every Friday Mr. Chervenick tried to inspire us, scampering across the frost-slicked grass in his chocolate leather coat and kid gloves and cordovans to herd us into formation until—in utter disgust—instead of steering a wayward oboe back on course he would simply arrest him or her by the shoulders so the entire block of winds had to stop, and then the brass and the drums, and we would have to start all over again.
Late one Friday in mid-December we were working on the tornado. Dusk had begun to fill the air and it was snowing, but Saturday was our last home game and Mr. Chervenick persuaded the janitor to turn on the lights. An inch or so had fallen during the day and it was impossible to see the lines. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” Mr. Chervenick shouted. When the girl pulling the xylophone slipped and twisted her ankle, he blew his whistle three times, which meant we were to line up for a final chastising pep talk before we could leave. He climbed the three steps of his little wheeled podium and let us stand in silence for a minute so we would realize how disappointed he was. Snow piled up in our hair. Beyond the sea of flakes drifting through the high lights came the ringing drone of a tractor-trailer’s chains on the interstate. In the valley, muffled by a ceiling of clouds, lay the burning grid of Butler, the black river, the busy mills.
“We have all worked very hard this year,” he said, and paused, breathing steam, as if speaking to a stadium, waiting for his words to circle. Beside me Warren Hardesty muttered something—a joke, a rejoinder—and then we heard what I immediately identified (from my own .22, my father’s Mossberg, the nightly news from Vietnam) as gunshots. A clump of them. They crackled like fireworks, echoed over the bare trees on the other side of the highway. They were close. The band turned to them in unison, something Mr. Chervenick could never get us to do.
It had just turned deer season, and we all knew the power company had a clearcut through there behind the water tower, as well as the rights to the few overgrown fields carved out of the woods, but all of us with guns knew the land was posted, too close to the road and the school. And the time wasn’t right for hunting, the light was gone. We looked to each other as if to confirm our surprise.
Mr. Chervenick seemed to understand too, though he was not the hunting type. He praised our dedication, excused us and, instead of leading us back over the footbridge, headed across the empty parking lot for the lit doors of the middle school and stood there rapping on the glass until the janitor let him in.
What we had heard was someone being murdered, someone most of us knew, if dimly. Her name was Annie Marchand, and I knew her first—years before this—merely as Annie the babysitter. Her name at that time was Annie Van Dorn. She lived, then, with her parents, the next house down the road from us. We were not strictly neighbors; between our new hi-ranch and their boxy Greek Revival stretched a mile-wide field Mr. Van Dorn leased to an old farmer named Carlsen. Yet whenever my mother and father decided to escape for dinner out or to a movie, Mr. Van Dorn’s truck would pull up at the bottom of our drive and out would pop Annie with her purse and her schoolbooks, ready to whip me at Candyland and train my sister Astrid to draw on eyeliner.
I suspect that at first Astrid was more in love with her than I was. At thirteen Annie was taller than our mother, and strikingly thin. Her red hair came to her waist; her fingers were covered with rings from admirers. She smelled of the Van Dorns’ oil furnace and Secret deodorant and Juicy Fruit gum, and she made pizza and sang “Ruby Tuesday” and, for me, “Mr. Big Stuff.” Our daydreams, I admit, included her becoming our mother. Once we had an evening-long argument with her over the word “milk,” which we—like most Western Pennsylvanians—pronounced “melk,” but it did nothing to mediate our crush on her. This went on for years, like a grand affair. She left us only when my sister was old enough to watch me, and by then Annie was out of school and working, and sometimes my mother could not get her for Fridays anyway. We’d see her driving by in her brother Raymond’s Maverick or riding behind her boyfriend on his Honda, but rarely. For a few years she became—by her proximity and absence—distant and mysterious. My bedroom faced the field, and at night I studied the yellow eyes of her house and pictured her in her darkened room looking back at me.
Since then she had moved out like her brothers and married and had a girl of her own, but things had not gone well for her. That spring, she and her husband had separated. Mrs. Van Dorn, now widowed, lived alone in the family house. My mother looked in on her every day after work, and often that fall Annie was there, in the kitchen, the two of them commiserating bitterly over coffee. The worst, they must have figured, had already happened.
According to my mother, Mrs. Van Dorn wanted Annie to move back in with her. Annie and her daughter were living alone above town by the high school. Her house was the only one on Turkey Hill Road, a wooded cul-de-sac that ended at the base of the county water tower. The road had once crossed Old Route 2 but when they laid the interstate the government bought up all the houses and blocked it off on both sides. Beyond a caution-striped guardrail the cracked blacktop wandered off into scrub. The other, unluckier houses were still back there, overgrown, shingles mossy; we used to party in them. Mrs. Van Dorn was worried about Annie’s safety, but she and Annie—again, according to my mother—didn’t get along well enough to live together, and Annie stayed where she was.
At the hearing her nearest neighbor, Clare Hardesty, said she’d heard the shots and gone to her window. The road was empty, the spotlit water tower half lost in the snow. Annie’s lights were on; a colored string blinked around a tree. Clare didn’t see any cars that didn’t belong, meaning, she explained, the boyfriend’s. The two had recently broken up; she would have noticed. When she called, no one answered, so she put on her boots and a wrap and walked down the road. The front door was open, the light spilling out onto the snow. (Here she was asked about footprints, a single broken pane, glass on the bathroom carpet; she didn’t know, she didn’t know.) Though the house was empty, something had happened inside. She tried the phone, then ran back to her place to call the state police.
And do you remember noticing, the transcript reads, if the back door was open at this time?
I don’t remember, Clare Hardesty answers.
I know—and everyone I grew up with knows—that the back door was open and that a pair of tracks led across the backyard and into the woods. We followed them at first in our imaginations, those snowy nights alone in bed (their breath, her bare feet sinking in), and then when the brave had made their pilgrimage, at lunch we hauled on our boots and crossed the interstate and slid down the hill to the spot we as a whole had chosen, just to one side of the board bridge over the spillway of Marsden’s Pond. Both the pond and the brook were iced over; only the spillway made noise. The more romantic of the tough girls had placed roses in a vase made of snow, every day a fresh one among the dead. Someone had tramped out a cross, which by January was neatly lined with beer cans. To one side sat a pile of lipsticked cigarette butts and burnt matches like an offering. We stood there, alone or in groups, looking back over the tangle of bare trees beyond which rose the water tower, and below it, invisible, her house. We passed a joint or bowl around and talked about how she was still there in the trees and the creek because the soul never dies. Someone always had gum, and I remember chewing and feeling my jaw harden and thinking that it was true, that I could feel Annie there. But at other times there was nothing, just munchies and a giddiness I would later be ashamed of.
March, cutting class, Warren Hardesty and I walked from the spot all the way to the edge of her backyard, retracing her last steps. It was farther than we thought, and we had to stop to stoke up a roach I’d saved. Warren had some blackberry brandy in a plastic Girl Scout canteen. It was Monday, around third period. The house was for sale but no one was going to buy it. The paint was peeling, the screenporch still full of her junk—lawnchairs, rabbit cages, deflated balls. Warren dared me to cross the lawn and just touch the house.
“You,” I said.
“Shit, I live right up the road.”
“So?” I said.
We did it together, leaving two sets of bootprints in the perfect snow. We each placed a gloved hand on the porch door. Through a casement window I could see a corner of a rug, and a chair, and light coming through the blue curtains of the front.
“Let’s go inside,” Warren said.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Pussy,” he said, as if there were someone else there judging us.
I dropped my glove to the door handle.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Warren promised.
The spring protested, rang as if strummed. I stuck my head in. A hose lay coiled beneath a fraying chaise like a snake; above hung a pair of clotheslines, a few grayed pins still clinging. I thought of Annie with a basket of clothes and wondered if she had a dryer or even a washer, because at our old house we—my mother, that is—had always had both, and now we had neither.
Warren pushed me from behind and I fell across a picnic-table bench, knocking over a stack of boxes. One came open and out rolled a yellow mailbox for the Butler Eagle. I screamed as if it were a head. Warren was running for the woods, laughing his ass off. I scrambled up and went after him, shouting, “Fucker!”
Later we went back, at first partying at the picnic table and then, when we were more comfortable, in the house itself. We sat on the couch in the chilly living room, passing the canteen, toasting Annie. We never took anyone else and we were careful to clean up after ourselves. We pledged never to take or even move anything. The Prime Directive, Warren called it.
That was me when I was fourteen and I’m not proud of how we treated her place, but now I think I went there because even then I knew I was closer to Annie than all those girls with their roses and the people who went to her funeral. We had history. Stoned, I tried to picture her life there, and her death, though back then that was impossible for me to see clearly. I tried, I suppose, to say goodbye. The house hasn’t changed much since then. Eventually someone less reverent broke in and set a fire, and the police boarded it up. It’s still there, burnt furniture and all. I’ve been by.
My mother and I never really talked about what happened. We shared a few words of shocked consolation, and there was an air of mourning about the house, but while the papers were full of accounts, we did not discuss the killing itself, how and why it came about. I now see that she (and myself, though I did not acknowledge it at the time) was going through her own slow tragedy and needed her grief for both herself and me. She still called my father to make sure he would pick me up every other Saturday, but they did not talk beyond money and the logistics of visitation.
We were all seeing a psychiatrist associated with our church, separately, on different days of the week. I remember that Dr. Brady and I mostly discussed hockey, though every session he would ask bluntly how I was doing at home, in school, with the band, with my mother, my father.
Continues...
Excerpted from Snow Angels by Stewart O'Nan Copyright © 2008 by Stewart O'Nan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Reading Group Guide
About this Guide
The following author biography and list of questions about Snow Angels are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach Snow Angels.
Discussion Questions
1. In Snow Angels, the characters pursue pleasures that they hope will lift them from despair – sometimes it is as simple as Annie's mother's desire for a Lorna Doone's cookie, sometimes it is an extra-marital affair –for Brock, it is perhaps Tricia. To what degree do you think the characters are entitled to these pleasures?
2. "She and Brock have been seeing each other for three weeks now but their affair has erased chunks of Annie's past." Discuss how, throughout the novel, the characters confront their former selves, and either become reacquainted with them or sever the connection.
3. Glenn is a Born Again Christian; Arthur and his mother move into an apartment complex that used to be dormitories for a failed seminary – a somewhat compromised desire for salvation seems to permeate the story. Discuss the ways in which the characters attempt to redeem themselves, and how the struggle to become something better affects the whole tone and environment of the book. Is it also significant that Glenn works in a junk yard, where the spare parts of burned out cars get a second chance?
4. From time to time the characters are preoccupied by the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team that seemed unstoppable in the mid-1970's. They also comment on the scores for the local football team. In a small town where the expectations are either modest or completely dashed, do you think it is common for people to pin their hopes, and perhaps even their pride, to a football team? Annie observes that the parking lot at the motel is full, and then imagines that they are the cars of "football widows" – is it only the men, then, who are so distracted?
5. Along those same lines, it is interesting to note that Arthur's mother loved a man who did not love her back, that she was "alone" in her dream of romance. Discuss the significance of this observation to all of the characters in Snow Angels.
6. Glenn is on anti-depressants; do you perceive depression as a disease that must be controlled by medication or as a condition that can only be overcome by will power? By religion? By love?
7. Discuss how Glenn and Annie manage the end of their relationship, with particular attention to their old attachments to one another. At first it seems that, for Annie, Glenn has not necessarily lost his charms, she even finds herself occasionally beguiled by him, but she knows that it will lead nowhere, that there is falseness behind it. Could the tragedy of Glenn and Annie have been caused by their inability to move on, to truly free themselves of old attachments?
8. Who do you think is more at fault for Tara's death, Annie or Glenn?
9. Annie says the reason their marriage ended was because Glenn did "nothing"; in your opinion, would we be happier if we accepted our partners as-is and love them for their particular character and disposition, without the expectation that the partner will transform, grow? Consider also the aspirations of the other people in town – out of them all, who at the end seems the most content? Arthur? Lila? Perhaps Mr. Chervenick?
10. Does Snow Angels have a religious point of view? Is this novel truly about a community that is spiritually famished? Or can we use the words religion, hope, and love interchangeably when discussing the themes of this book?
11. In this novel, we observe the deterioration of two relationships from two very different angles – in the case of Annie and Glenn, we experience it from within, and in the case of Arthur's parents, we watch from outside. What is the difference, and why do you think Stewart O'Nan tells the story this way? At one point, when Annie and her mother are talking about the Parkinson's divorce, she says they "always seemed happy to me."
12. It can be said that Snow Angels is a book with a soundtrack: Steely Dan, Cat Stevens, Aerosmith, Neil Young, and other 1970's rock ‘n' roll is piped in on various car radios, or through Arthur's headphones. When Glenn is happy about his lunch date with Annie, he runs every detail of it through his head "until he knows it like a favorite song". Discuss the importance of music to the novel, how is the author carefully using it to help tell his story?
13. What does Arthur's mother mean when she says, on pg 67, "Don't ever become a woman"? Are the women in this story afflicted in a way that the men are not? It is interesting to note that all of the women here work, and that Glenn has difficulty holding down a job – is it part of his general failure that he is "not man enough"?
14. Discuss the blossoming affection between Lila Rayburn and Arthur, in what ways is it different or similar to the strained or failing relationships throughout the book? Is there a general conclusion that you can draw about the nature of love and companionship from this book?
15. Annie and Glenn are constantly negotiating and balancing – see, for example, how Glenn attempts to pay for things (the photographs, their lunch together), and Annie attempts to neutralize his "generosity". Discuss how Annie and Glenn leverage their relationship, and what are some other small details that the author observes about how people in a relationship sometimes unintentionally try to get the upper hand?
16. Annie thinks at one point that she "can't imagine being so in love that she'd be unable to say no to someone." Why do people believe in unconditional love, and are the expectations of such love fortifying or detrimental to one's emotional health?
17. Why is Annie annoyed with Glenn's habit of offering Tara choices, rather than simply telling her what to do? What does this say about Glenn, about Annie?
18. Interestingly, when Glenn visits his old school buddy Rafe to talk about his problems early in the novel, Rafe, who is sterile, simply tells him to be grateful for Tara. Is one source of conflict in the story the simple fact that the characters have trouble seeing far enough beyond their own wounds to offer comfort to one another? Is this a universal problem? Are there any characters who are an exception to this — consider Arthur's relationship with his mother.
19. Glenn is adopted, and his personal folklore of faded memories is something he often meditates on (when he steals the frames from the department store, perhaps he is thinking it is his father's outlaw blood that made him do it). Do you think his life would have been different had he been born into a family that was stable? Would he still be depressed? Why do you think O'Nan includes these details of his past in the story?
20. A monumental event occurs at what is almost the precise halfway point in the book. Talk a little about how Snow Angels is structured, about where it's large turning points fall, and their cumulative effect. In what ways is it similar or different from the five-act tragedies of Shakespeare, or Aristotle's model of a story with rising action, climax, and dénouement? Why do you think O'Nan chooses to begin the story with the gunshots, what is the dramatic effect?
21. What do you make of Brock's inability to cry after Tara's death? Although he assumes little responsibility, does he at times seem like the most well-adjusted character in the book? The most content? When Annie tells him he can leave, he thinks, "it's strange… how he's no longer afraid of falling through [the ice]."
22. At times Glenn is violent, other times fragile, and always, in his way, he is vulnerable. But would you have predicted that he was capable of what ultimately comes to pass in this novel?