Word: nan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When asked why he chose the second person, O'Nan explained, "I had the feel, the mood of the book for two or three years." But when he tried the first and the third person, they felt "clumsy," "The author steps in too much," he commented...
...what truly involves the reader with Jake is O'Nan's arresting use of second person. "You like it like this, the bright languid days," the narrator instructs immediately. The reader watches Friendship through Jake's eyes; he smells death through Jake's nose. He contemplates hell through Jake's fears...
Silence, Silence. There was no other way I could end this novel. With every question resolved and yet still looming, with every horror extinguished and yet still ringing, the narrator in Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying is left only to accept his own futile insanity. Carried on a probing journey of terror and tenderness, the reader is confronted directly with his own mortality, his own anxieties, his own powerlessness...
...horror novel, It's sick," explained O'Nan candidly at a book signing last Tuesday...
...first striking aspect of O'Nan's novel is his language. I read the first paragraph four times, allowing ample time for the luscious, vivid imagery to soak through my bones. But the intensity of the novel is apparent from the beginning: the heat and weight of the lazy summer mood push the edges and demand release. From the beginning, the reader feels the hidden furnace of madness churning and knows instinctively that, if all is so plodding and weary to start, something dramatic must be brewing...