Stewart O'Nan

A Master of Many Voices

With his complex novels on the human condition, American author Stewart O'Nan forces readers into the same moral dilemmas as his characters and asks them to find their own way out.

A woman awaits execution for mass murder. A Vietnam veteran is being stalked by a figure from his past. A sheriff unwittingly brings a deadly epidemic to a small Midwestern town. These are some of the characters in Stewart O'Nan's novels" -- average, yet desperate" people in extreme situations. How will they react under the pressure of war, catastrophe or personal tragedy?

These are a few of the themes common in O'Nan's works, which show a remarkable range of perspective, setting and mood. Perhaps it has something to do with O'Nan's work as a structural test engineer before he decided to pursue a writing career: the idea of subjecting something to extreme stress to see what happens. But unlike the airframes he used to test, humans react in all sorts of unpredictable and inexplicable ways, which is the thread O'Nan sets out to explore.

"I want to believe people aren't that easy to understand, that even we who believe ourselves sensible often don't know why we do some very important things," O'Nan writes in the essay "Flannery O'Connor, Meet Stephen King." "I want to find out why things happen, but I don't believe psychology has all the answers. As Flannery O'Connor said, art wants to go past the place where psychology leaves off. That's where understanding lies."

A plethora of influences

And how did O'Nan become a writer interested in such questions? Born in 1961 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he lists cartoons, horror comics and TV among his earliest influences, along with Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan" series, World War II flying stories and Stephen King. At age 18, O'Nan began studying aerospace engineering at Boston University, where he also developed an interest in novelist William S. Burroughs, the nouveau roman and foreign film, among other things.

As a structural test engineer working the graveyard shift at Grumman Aerospace in Long Island, New York, O'Nan had time to read "heavy-duty stuff like Camus and Dostoevsky that was supposed to talk about the human condition" as well as Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. He wrote short stories and a "long philosophical novel -- a real mistake for someone who'd never attempted a novel before," he has said. In 1988 he won the Ascent Fiction Prize for his story "Econoline" and discovered the "living world of writing," which he liked better than working the graveyard shift.

On his wife's advice, O'Nan went back to school and earned a master of fine arts degree at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, when he was 30. Another story, "The Third of July," won the Columbia Fiction Award in 1989, and O'Nan wrote drafts that eventually turned into the novels Snow Angels (which won the William Faulkner Prize in 1993) and A World Away (1998). He hasn't slowed down since, putting out about one new book each year and gathering a respectable share of literary awards.

In 1996, the literary magazine "Granta" named O'Nan as one of the best young American novelists, an honor he shared with writers such as David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections). Others might have found such recognition a burden, raising expectations for their next books. But thanks to his consistent production, O'Nan was able to take it in stride, as he told an interviewer in 1997.

"If people ask me if I have the work to back up the award, I can just say, 'Yeah, here it is,'" he said.

But O'Nan does not simply churn out one book after another. Describing the research that went into his novel about a Vietnam veteran, The Names of the Dead, O'Nan said: "I felt responsible to the men and women who had been in Vietnam, so I was very painstaking in getting everything right." The work also informed The Vietnam Reader, an anthology of fiction and non-fiction about the war that he originally put together for a class he was teaching and to which he contributed two essays on the war's representation in film.