Ohio is a eulogy to middle America and its flyover states ... Timely and of vital importance, Ohio delves into the spectrum of issues consuming contemporary America’s Rust Belt, exploring topics like joblessness, addiction, terrorism, sexuality, religion and sex, to name a few. Markley’s disturbing masterpiece reads like the offspring of Harlan Coben, Jonathan Franzen and Hanya Yanagihara: an illuminating snapshot of our current era masquerading as a twisted character-driven thriller, filled with mordant wit and soul-shaking patho ... Markley purposely provokes his readers, challenging us to confront and ponder topics and people that make us uncomfortable. His method will undoubtedly prove divisive, but those who have the temerity to let Ohio absorb them will be rewarded.
Markley's debut is a sprawling, beautiful novel that explores the aftermath of the Great Recession ... Markley intersperses the stories of the four Ohioans with flashbacks to high school, and his portrayals are horrifyingly accurate. He does a perfect job examining the casual cruelties teenagers inflict on one another ... There's a lot going on in Ohio — a sprawling cast of main and supporting characters, and a series of interconnected events that doesn't come together until the book's shocking conclusion. But Markley handles it beautifully; the novel is intricately constructed, with gorgeous, fiery writing that pulls the reader in and never lets go ... Written with a real love for its characters, Ohio isn't just a remarkable debut novel, it's a wild, angry and devastating masterpiece of a book.
A prehistory of now, Markley’s bruising novel chronicles a decade in which those in the sinking parts of our nation began looking for anyone to blame and anything to relieve the pain of loss ... every one of this socially representative cast of characters is broken; the only variety is by what. There’s the Great Recession, the flight of manufacturing, the ravages of addiction, sexual violence—the full smorgasbord of American tragedy ... The diverse trajectories of these young people provide the author an arsenal of cultural signifiers with which to mine his fictional landscape, as well as the opportunity to expound on contemporary politics, religion, sex, drugs, literature, music and much else. This is novel as compendium ... But for all its genuinely absorbing qualities, Ohio retains a whiff of calculation ... the determination to create an explosive powerhouse of a book emanates from every page here. Markley can’t resist using his characters as mouthpieces ... Novels that simultaneously attempt to explicate political history and plumb the human condition are liable to succeed at neither, but Stephen Markley’s exuberant embrace of such risk is laudable in itself.
But Markley clearly has more on his mind than a tightly wound plot... The novel churns with such ambitious social statements and insights that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid... Ohio would have been a better novel with less of this explication. The most moving parts of the book are those that step back and let the events and the actions speak for themselves, as when one character (the shy, bookish one from high school) recalls his three tours in Afghanistan. The beautifully precise details are all the more vivid for their lack of accompanying commentary ... The real core of this earnestly ambitious debut lies not in its sweeping statements but in its smaller moments, in its respectful and bighearted renderings of damaged and thwarted lives. It’s the human scale that most descriptively reveals the truth about the world we’re living in.
Set in 2013, the novel follows four 20-something characters who’ve returned to their southern Ohio hometown of New Canaan on the same night to settle scores and rekindle relationships. Bill is the lefty world traveler with a drug habit. Stacey is a literary scholar determined to confront the judgmental mother of her high school girlfriend, Dan is an Afghanistan vet watching his hometown witness economic decline. Tina was bullied mercilessly in high school, and she knows where to find the lead bully ... Markley’s novel is in line with a dark strain of Midwestern fiction that runs from Edgar Lee Masters to Gillian Flynn. Its bleakness and style are appealing. Just don’t confuse it for literary realism, let alone reality.
Ohio is not for the squeamish. Opioids (and every other drug), gang rape, torture, murder, suicide, domestic terrorism, wartime atrocities—it’s all there, described in feverish prose that reaches for the stars and sometimes lands on the pavement ... For every misfire, there are a dozen triumphs, large and small. The characters walk and talk like real, messed-up people; the author cares about them, and so does the reader.
The shifting narrators throughout the book serve the whirlwind that Markley has created. It’s fully engrossing from the start, save moments when you’re taken aback by how good the writing really is, how flawless the storytelling ... Ohio is a ceaselessly beautiful and gut-wrenching debut.
Fortunately Mr. Markley comes to the zeitgeist honestly, and this is a book of genuine substance and style ... Mr. Markley’s skill is apparent in the novel’s structure. Roving between points of view and snaking backward and forward in time, the chapters interlock like puzzle pieces, gradually revealing a series of violent crimes.
These attempts at political profundity fall flat, and while one should never read a novel through a lens of priggishness, the constancy of crude jokes, scatological references and 'shock jock' banter undermines the seriousness of the subject matter. ... It is likely that many novels and films will follow the Ohio formula as Americans scramble to dissect Trump’s frightening rise to power and decipher the decline of the United States. They will all remain small and small-minded — nothing more than fictionalized and cinematic versions of Hillbilly Elegy — if their creators do not have the courage to risk what John Irving called 'the slur of sentimentality' ... The novel self-destructs, despite its good intentions, because by showing nothing but contempt and condescension toward its characters, and toward New Canaan and the countless towns it represents, it becomes what it despises: Just another exercise of American cruelty.
[A] brilliant novel, not only a story of an Ohio town, but a sketch showing a microcosm of little towns across the width and breadth of America— 'Raw towns that we believe and die in,' as the poet W.H Auden once wrote in a 1940 tribute to W.B. Yeats.
Markley’s debut novel is set in small-town Ohio, post 9/11, and catalogs the myriad ways that war and recession have failed a generation who have known little else. In New Canaan, a town suffering after factories shutter, readers follow four stories of twentysomethings who knew each other in high school, and the fallout of long-held secrets ... Markley...firmly plants readers in the setting even as the author jumps in time, often from paragraph to paragraph. After the leisurely paced majority of the book, the final 100 pages feel rushed, and the climax comes from seemingly nowhere, but even this does little to take away from an...tragic story.
...Once a bastion of steel-mill industry, New Canaan has been corroded by economic downturn and opiates; it’s pervaded by a sense of disillusionment shared by four, whose rudderless adult lives pale alongside the blinding lights of their adolescence. Over the course of one night—interlaced with high school flashbacks—the four settle old scores and uncover some of the town’s nefarious secrets ... Markley’s novel is alternately disturbing...providing a broad view of the anxieties of a post-9/11 Middle America and the complexities of the humans who navigate them.
Markley’s flagrantly symphonic debut novel is effectively four linked novellas, with each section circling around a high school friend or acquaintance of Rick, who was killed in action in Iraq. Each person has hit on hard times in their 20s, and on one evening in their hometown of New Canaan, they’re laboring to set things right ... Markley is a storyteller, infusing each section with realistic detail, from the drudgery of Walmart work to war to the fleeting ecstasies of drugs to violence, especially self-harm ... But this novel is best appreciated as a set of portraits rather than (as the title suggests) a definitive statement about an entire state.
