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Customer Reviews of Everyday People

Contemporary inner-city saga
Stewart O'Nan, a young white man, sets for himself a most ambitious task in his 2001 novel Everyday People: a contemporary story set in the inner city, with mostly or entirely black characters, and dialogue in black dialect. As for setting, characters, and language, he succeeds. Where O'Nan came up a bit short was with plot. In large measure, O'Nan follows Chris ("Crest") Tolbert and his family during one week before the opening of a new expressway which will effectively cut the Tolbert's neighborhood from the rest of the city. Before the novel began, Crest was rendered a paraplegic when he fell of the half-completed parkway in an accident which also killed his best friend. How Crest, his family, his girlfriend (and now mother of his son), and others deal with this tragedy is a very promising beginning. O'Nan's failure, I believe, was in attempting to make his story too true to life, with several minor plot lines or stories that get started and remain unresolved - and unaddressed - by the book's final pages. Although this is how life often works, as a reader I found myself at the end asking "what about this?," and "what happened to him?" O'Nan overall seems a very gifted writer, and his characters are outstandingly drawn. Everyday People is certainly well worth reading for these reasons. However, in my judgment, it could have been better.

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TODAY'S PEOPLE
With his latest novel, ''Everyday People,'' Stewart O' Nan invents and enters the deprived African-American Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) neighborhood of East Liberty in the fall of 1998. At this time the neighborhood is about to be cut off from the rest of the city by the opening of a new expressway for buses. The town has always been victim to poverty and gang violence; during this one week, their patience will be tested more than usual.
At the center of the novel is the Tolbert family. Chris, also known as Crest, a seventeen-year-old boy who is the youngest in the Tolbert family, has just returned from the hospital in a wheelchair, coming out of a tragic accident that occurred on that very expressway which left him paralyzed from the waist down. That accident happened to take the life of his best friend, Bean. His older brother, Eugene, has just returned from jail and found Jesus as a born-again Christian. Harold, the boys' kind and loving father, is in love with a younger man (Andre) but leaves him, rationalizing that his boys need him more. Harold's wife, Jackie, senses that something is not right (though she believes his lover to be a younger woman), and is furious because the man she has always trusted has become the kind of man she had sworn she would never tolerate. Vanessa, the teenage mother of Crest's son, Rashaan, is trying to make more of her life by trying to balance her responsibility as a mother with the stress of waiting tables, and takes an adult education class in African-American literature at night school and realizes that she wants to learn more, which hopefully, will motivate her to obtain a college degree. Miss Fisk, is an elderly woman who looks after Rashaan, the way she used to look after Bean. Besides this one family, there are people dying, children involved with gangs, and many others being robbed all around.
Stewart O' Nan may be doubted because he is a white author who writes about an underprivileged African-American community and may not fully understand the experiences of those who actually live there. He captures the readers' attention with his vivid descriptions and interesting story plot. He incorporates the everyday lives that continue to go on in urban America. Many people are blind to see the reality of our world but this novel helps them listen to the voices of these characters, and let them know that they are everyday people, rather than gangsters, thieves, prostitutes or even drug addicts. Clearly the author wants the reader to realize how one crime can affect a whole community over a period of time. Honestly, I was a little disappointed because I'd rather of spent more time inside the head of Crest. He seemed like a good levelheaded boy who was influenced a lot by his surroundings. I would have loved to know all of his thoughts about what was going on in his community for that week, especially what he went through that will now change his life forever. It seemed like the underlying message of the story was to try and do good in life by staying on track and especially in school with an education because that is the key to a successful future, like Vanessa is trying to achieve.

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NEAR MISS
I can understand why this book may be compelling to those who are not: a)from Pittsburgh, b)looking for a intricately crafted story line, and most importantly c)African American. As the author notes near the end, maybe for a split second he can see what I see, but unfortunately, he fails to communicate the rich texture of the Black experience even in as wholly depressing environment as he attempts to create.

This book turned out to be a group of short stories centered on the daily stresses and encumbrances encountered by the Tolbert family and other community denizens in what he perceives to be life in Black urban America. I commend him on his ability to convey emotional structure but he fails to provide adequate imagery to give the reader a sense of the physical. I have a better mental picture of Tony's ice cream truck than any of the so-called African-American members of this community.

Within the Black community, descriptives that distinguish one person from another by complexion or physical features are commonplace. We only know the ethnicity of his characters by the authors' avowals and his inconsistent attempts to capture the vernacular which, by the way is not enhanced by any inclusions of "Pittsburghese." His patois of the street strikes me like someone without language skills attempting to emulate an upper crust British accent.

I was also disappointed in his failure to address the impact of ethnicity in relation Harold's homosexuality. Acceptance of that lifestyle has implications in the community - across the board and most particularly in the Black church- that Mr. O'Nan avoids entirely.

In essence, Mr. O'Nan writes of a sense of frustration, powerlessness and to an extent, resignation that is not predominant in East Liberty. It appears to be he who is incapable of seeing beyond the walls of the busway.

This is a competent effort, one that merits attention as a study of the human condition, however the emphasis on the African American community is a misguided one for this writer. I would suggest "Drop" by Matt Johnson or "White Boy Shuffle" by Paul Beatty, as two efforts more successfully conveying the subleties of the urban experience.