JE: It’s no secret around here that I’ve long been a big fan of Stewart O’Nan. In his unassuming and workmanlike way, he may be the best American novelist of the past twenty years. Certainly, he’s the most underrated. I love his tiny apertures, his luminous details, and of course his range. Despite O’Nan’s obvious attention to craft, his writing never feels overworked.–it always serves the story,. He rarely draws attention to himself. I love that he’s not a show-off–because he could be if he wanted to. The bottom line is O’Nan doesn’t need to show off, because he knows the characters are the story, and he knows how to unfold them.

I loved “The Odds”.  Art is a great everyman. Marion is a great everywoman. Separately and together, they embody their times. They’re not quirky characters, not terribly unique or colorful in any way, but lordy are they fleshed out. Like all of O’Nan’s novels (that I’ve read), “The Odds” feels incredibly real. The story is a genuine human experience. As a reader, you really inhabit the characters. All of this is quite an accomplishment when you consider the plot could easily be fodder for a Hollywood romantic comedy, or even a TV sitcom. The whole story is a set-up. The entire scenario is convenient. But O’Nan, because of his attention to detail, because of his mastery of digression, because of his impeccable timing and pacing, and his excellent decision-making, can animate even the most wooden of characters or scenarios.

JR:  Art and Marion are victims of the American Dream, or should I say, victims of careful what you wish for.They have lost everything. Money, house, jobs, and their marriage. But what in this bag of sorrow did they really lose? No one held a gun to their heads and made them go down this way, building their own gilded cage by living on credit. Would it be so bad if they just walked away from each other? Art is more tragic than Marion because he believed that by being a good soldier for big business, that would somehow preserve his job. It did no such thing. Marion is also the victim of down sizing, but she seems more resigned than sad at the outcome of her life. Whats the out? Niagara Falls, Valentines Day, go to the casino and put it all on black.

Marion is the downer in this story, she knows the odds of winning and making a comeback. She and Art have decided to climb out the same way they dug themselves in, by risking everything on a silly mirage. I liked how O’Nan put us right in the mix, from the moment we meet this broken couple, cramped on a shitty bus, getting in an accident, like fate telling them, “you can’t get back what you never had”. Marion is tired all over, and Art still thinks there is hope to save their marriage which crumbled from no fault of their own. Money, debt and mortality drove a wedge between them, and nothing else can be blamed, not infidelity, loss of job, or an empty nest. Their shadows carry this weight, even at night.

There are minor moments of excitement in this little adventure, the night at the Heart concert, the food poisoning which seems to teach Marion a lesson. Art is wishing that he can get one last good time with his wife, and help her see the light. The real sad part of this story is that he wants a second chance to make the same mistake again. I loved the hotel they stayed in, O’Nan’s details on the food, carpet, and the tile on the floor of the bathroom, all seem like cast offs, but bring this tale into sharp focus. He also finds the most ridiculously small spots to put Art and Marion, and then stuff’s them in, just to see what will happen. O’Nan is telling you a lot with this tale, almost too much. Overall, what he is showing is that this couple isn’t special, and the only person on their side is fate, which has always been there, they just couldn’t see it.

DH: Stewart O’Nan is the only writer we all review. The Guys basically agree on nothing, except that Stewart O’Nan is a great writer. Consider the first sentence; I marked the words I liked: hounded, insolvency, stupidly, memory, infidelity, fled. Second sentence: (fled) like the slaves, Marion tells her sister, Celia. So by the second sentence O’Nan has named his two principals, Art and Marion Fowler and sister Celia, who serves as a foil for Marion.

Fowler is a great choice for a family name. The name in itself creates a tension, as in foul like…the most unhappy couple in George Cukor’s The Women is also named Fowler.

Art and Marion float through their marriage on a credit, both financial and emotional, that seems to be exhausted. There is the same poetic flow of short and long chapters that I noticed in Emily Alone. But in the center of the story is a longish chapter were Art gets downsized that could almost stand by itself. Art’s work friends, who each had offices on either side of him, are knocked off one after the other like wooden ducks before management finally comes with the muscle of a security guard to tell Art to leave. As Art walks through the company parking lot for the last time, it’s like he’s been ordered to leave the middle class.

Each chapter of The Odds is titled by quoting a probability. Art and Marion are knocked around their lives like a pair of dice hitting the craps table. This almost pristine perfect story ends at a roulette wheel where it is the reader who is being played. You feel a surge of joy as you sense O’Nan’s terrific narrative virtuosity cresting over. But I would have omitted the last line in the galley. It’s what I’d call the one-line-too-many syndrome. It’s when the writer, on an awesome roll, just can’t let go of the pen and feels a need to characterize the story. Let your readers figure it out for themselves, Mr. O’Nan.