Stewart O’Nan’s Ocean State grippingly dives deep into America’s ‘dirt poor’

Stewart O’Nan shows his skill in Ocean State

Anne Cunningham

June 19 2022 02:30 AM

Ocean State Stewart O’Nan Grove Press, €14.99

To write a gripping murder mystery, while giving the game away in the very first line, is not, I’d venture, a prospect for the fainthearted nor indeed for any writer with less experience than Stewart O’Nan, who has published 20 previous novels in the US and has been called a ‘master of the quotidian’.

Ocean State opens with: “When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.” The only way to go from there is backwards, obviously, and it is the backstory of this murder, along with its consequences, that keeps the reader glued.

Marie Olivieri lives with her older sister, the murderer ironically named Angel, and their single mother in a rundown house in a rundown town among a blue-collar community in Rhode Island, New England. Their mother Carol works hard, drinks too much, and has a habit of bringing home feckless boyfriends. Until, that is, she meets Russ.

But he’s old enough to live in a retirement community, although he is a man of considerable means. Marie and Angel live on microwave dinners and largely fend for themselves; their mother works long days as a nurse’s aide followed by long nights searching for ‘the one’.

Angel has been dating a rich boy in school for three years when Birdy – the girl who’s been murdered – comes along and turns the boyfriend’s head. An ‘affair’ ensues (bearing in mind these are only kids) and it seems Birdy needs to be taught a lesson, one that goes horribly wrong.

And it’s in the excavation of this extraordinary ‘whydunnit’, rather than whodunnit, that O’Nan reveals the mess of inequality and lack of opportunity in contemporary America. This book is not a defence, but it is an exploration of the haves versus the have-nots, and the sacrifices the have-nots are required to make simply to tread water.

Of course, the reader sympathises with Birdy and her plight, but nothing is black and white in this story. The plight of the Olivieri sisters is closely examined too. While they have the ordinary trappings of 21st century teenagers, they have nobody who’s focused on their wellbeing.

This is an updated portrait of America’s ‘dirt poor’, complete with laptops and smartphones, finding the quality of mercy is strained indeed when you don’t have the funds to buy it.