BIBLIOFILE
Everyday People
by Stewart O'Nan
(Grove Press, 192 pages, $24)

Stewart O'Nan
Twenty-third Avenue Books, 1015 NW 23rd Ave., 224-6203.
7:30 pm Thursday,
March 8.

Stewart O'Nan takes the word "novel" quite literally, as each new work of his is a startling departure from his last. In five books, O'Nan has proved equally adept at tender family drama, gallows humor, psychological realism, and gothic horror. As expected, in his new offering O'Nan sets himself a fresh challenge: to write a compelling, character-driven novel without the anchor of a central character. He almost succeeds.

Everyday People describes the lives of several inhabitants of East Liberty, an increasingly marginalized black Pittsburgh neighborhood mired in crime, poverty and gang violence. Each chapter explores the perspective of a different resident, among them a compassionate, aging spinster, a closeted gay father, a teenager juggling college and single parenthood, and, by far the strongest character, a recently crippled teenage graffiti artist.

Each of these characters' lives is shaped by a personal struggle between private yearning and the arbitrary limitations of circumstance. O'Nan's great skill as a writer is his ability to make this so palpably apparent; to bring his readers to identify with people with whom they may have little in common.

Nonetheless, the novel feels a bit like crashing a stranger's party: So much time is spent meeting everyone that the evening is over before you've gotten past the small talk. Here, O'Nan distributes the focus among so many characters that it's difficult for his narrative to develop any proper tension. Still, Stewart O'Nan is such a strong writer that Everyday People, though flawed, does not exactly disappoint. But it is comforting to know that his next book will be something completely different. C.P. Farley

Plot
by Claudia Rankine
(Grove Press, 96 pages, $13)

Claudia Rankine
Poetry Downtown, Portland Arts & Lectures at the First Congregational Church, 1126 SW Park Ave., 227-2583. 7:30 pm Monday, March 12.

Claudia Rankine's Plot sets out the fears and doubts of bringing a child into the hostile world of our new millennium. That the book's couple--Liv and Erland--are expecting a child they have dubbed "Ersatz" echoes such uncertainty.

With all its theatrical allusions, I intended somehow to tie Plot to theater. Samuel Beckett came to mind. I saw Rankine's Liv and Erland waiting, not in an existential wasteland, but against a surreal backdrop of breasts, swollen bellies, tears, mother's milk--not for Godot but for Ersatz's arrival. I thought too of Beckett's Breath (from Oh, Calcutta!)--the birth cry and several seconds of breathing of a newborn child. But as I ventured further into this amazing book I instead began to play in my mind Bob Dylan's '60s song "Masters of War," especially the line "...the fear to bring children into the world."

Other readers have alluded to this book's striking, innovative structure, with its alternating prose paragraphs, recognizable poems, dialogues, monologues and pieces of stream-of-consciousness. Shifts in grammatical conventions and punctuation make for a variety of rhythms that never allows the reader to be lulled into complacency, aided by abundant wordplay and clever rephrasing of clichés ("As if all the world were staged"; "In the time it takes to fix her face the moon is drawn quartered").

Rankine's is a rare work worth encountering. Well-wrought and full of surprising intuitions, Plot is certainly one of the most intelligent and startling meditations on maternity and childbirth I have ever read. Carlos Reyes

Scholarship
by Cecilia Storey
(Joyride Press, 26 pages, $6)

Portlander Cecilia Storey's graphic novel Scholarship reads like a virginal twin to the ferociously sexual Dirty Plotte comic series by Julie Doucet and is a natural in a genre known for its self-lacerating meditations disguised as cutie-pie girl comix. The bulk of the text concentrates on a seemingly autobiographical narrative, which ruefully details young Rose's art-school angst, the loneliness of "getting involved" and the frustration of being the dumping ground for a drama queen's constant self-obsessions. Also tucked into the tale is an agonizingly amusing girl-meets-They Might Be Giants-band-boy sub-plot.

The author especially excels at depicting the spiritual brutality that comes from having a Seventh-Day Adventist roommate who only "likes the annoying part of the '60s" and who has to ask what "sodomy" means. Concluding the work is a short series of vignettes titled "I Don't Like You" that are horrifyingly awash with other unsavory characters.

Illustrating Storey's story with more than a nod to Picasso's later work, Gustaf Mortier upholds the Cubist tradition of expressing space in strongly geometrical terms. The protagonist generally takes the foreground, while bystanders are depicted as mere shadows, underscoring the general feeling of self-consciousness and ill ease oozing from Rose's life. Her glasses also take privileged focus in the illustrations, further emphasizing the artist's need to produce a conceptual, rather than perceptual, image of Storey's engaging character.

Cecilia Storey is a fine writer--spare, honest, darkly comic, and without a trace of the shy-girl smugness that can contaminate stories of this ilk. Lisa Warner