“Zanesville Road, once nothing but fields, had vanished under pavement and parking lots. The New Canaan they return to is different from the one of their childhood.

There is Bill Ashcraft, the cocky coked-out and burned-out activist Stacey Moore, an English Ph.D candidate confronting a former friend and lover’s parent Dan Eaton, a three-tour veteran who can’t get over a high school love (none of them can do this) and Tina Ross, who everyone vaguely remembers as the high school tramp. The narrative revolves around four natives of New Canaan, who have all moved away and are returning for disparate reasons that eventually collide in dramatic turn. Ohio is an intimate, long look at a single night in New Canaan, a fictional “corn and rust” town set somewhere between central and northeast Ohio. Other reviewers will undoubtedly call it the Hillbilly Elegy novel. Stephen Markley’s debut novel, Ohio, does not seek to answer the question of Trump’s rise-even if others will read reasons into it. The best storytellers resist both of these impulses and write the superstructures into the scene without leaving individuals bereft of the drama of their own lives. They just need to shape up, go back to church and pull themselves out of ruin.

On the other side of the argument, these corporate structures are totally irrelevant to the individual moral and political choices that have led the individual into despair. These are absolutely determining factors that deprive flyover citizens of agency we ought to excuse the wrongs of rural America in light of these. Depending on whose account you read, Midwestern voters (this, again, is all they are worth) are enslaved or indifferent to the structures they live and work in: a never-ending war(s) on terror, the 2008 financial crisis, the proliferation of opioids, an Affordable Care Act that still allows thousands to go broke from health care costs.

Book ohio by stephen markley