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    After the Parade
    After the Parade
    After the Parade
    Audiobook12 hours

    After the Parade

    Written by Lori Ostlund

    Narrated by Sean Runnette

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    From Flannery O'Connor and Rona Jaffe Award winner Lori Ostlund, a deeply moving and beautiful debut novel about a man who leaves his longtime partner in New Mexico for a new life in San Francisco, launching him on a tragicomic road trip and deep into the mysteries of his own Midwestern childhood.

    Sensitive, big-hearted and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like direction of his partner Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to stop letting life happen to him and take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco-where he alternates between shoddy garage apartment and the absurdly ramshackle ESL school where he teaches-Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Morton, Minnesota: a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron's childhood heartbreaks and hopes.

    After Aarons father dies in the town parade, it was the larger than life misfits of his childhood-a sardonic, wheel-chair bound dwarf named Clarence, a generous, obese baker Bernice, a kindly aunt preoccupied with dreams of The Rapture-who helped Aaron find his place in a provincial world hostile to difference. But Aaron's sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores-Aaron's loving yet selfish enigmatic mother-vanished one night with the town pastor. Aaron hasn't  heard from Delores in more than twenty years, but when a shambolic PI named Bill offers a key to closure, Aaron must confront his own role in his troubled past and rethink his place in a world of unpredictable, life-changing forces.

    Lori Ostlund's debut novel is an openhearted contemplation of how we grow up and move on, how we can turn our deepest wounds into our greatest strengths. Written with homespun charm and unceasing vitality, After the Parade is a glorious new anthem for the outsider.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 22, 2015
    ISBN9781622318865
    Author

    Lori Ostlund

    Lori Ostlund’s first collection of stories, The Bigness of the World, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. It was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, was a Lambda finalist, and was named a Notable Book by The Short Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. In 2009, Lori received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is the author of the novel, After the Parade and lives in San Francisco.

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    Reviews for After the Parade

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      This is one of the all-too rare can't-put-it-down novels. It begins with middle-aged Aaron Englund summoning the courage to leave his long-time partner, Walter, to move to San Francisco and an uncertain future. He rents an "apartment" in a garage and finds work as an ESL teacher.Aaron's childhood is relived through memories, and we see an only child raised by a controlling, abusive father and a mentally unstable mother. The parade in the title refers to a small-town parade in which Aaron's father, a policeman, fell off a float and died. This was a life-altering event for Aaron and his mother, culminating in his mother leaving Aaron in the senior year of high school without an explanation or a good-bye. This betrayal led Aaron to seek a place to belong throughout his life, and determining it is not with Walter required a great leap of faith into the unknown. As an ESL teacher, his interactions with his class members are both humorous and deeply poignant. Aaron is among the lost and the lonely in a society that often overlooks those who need a kind word and caring heart. Aaron touched me deeply with his yearning to become someone of value and his unerring compassion toward others on the fringes of society despite emotional scars from a childhood and adolescence that led to a broken spirit yearning to heal. This is a beautifully-written novel and highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      After barreling through the first two thirds of this book with absolutely no self control, I slowly rationed out the last third bit by bit. I simply did not want this book to ever come to an end. I enjoyed Ostlund's book of short stories so much when I read it earlier this month, I was afraid I wouldn't like her novel as much as is often the case for me with authors who write both novels and short stories. Not so, I could almost start over at the beginning of the book and read it again.
    • 2/5
      fiction (family history drama- main character is gay but plot is not centered on this aspect). This had lots of interesting layers -- different periods of Aaron's life would unravel as the current plotline was developing--but my interest dropped off after a while (so many depressing characters would get introduced--the abusive father who died abruptly in a freak accident, the dwarf whom people can't look in the face, the mother who abandoned Aaron when he was still a teen, the obese cook who got teased and had to drop out of school, and on and on)
    • 5/5
      This incredible novel of a man's entire forty year span of being treated terribly as a child and feeling worse as an adult should result in such a depressing read that putting it aside it would be a mercy. However, the author is so skilled that the seemingly trivial occurrences in the life of Aaron Englund become totally monumental and revelatory. The build to its apex is so quietly powerful that when the reader finishes, the impulse is to sit with book in hand and perform some deep breathing exercises.Aaron is the son of a brutish police officer and his beaten down spouse, and the bleakest of small farming communities of Minnesota is completely oppressive until his father dies in a most unusual (yet welcome) manner and his mother abandons him. He is rescued by the kindness of near-strangers and later by an older man, Walter, who comes as a package with a supportive sister. As the novel opens twenty years later, Aaron himself is fleeing from Walter, to San Francisco, as his diary of Walter's intolerable quirks numbers close to fifty. On his car trip west, Aaron himself saves a life and begins his own new life calling a garage home and teaching English to immigrants in a fleabag fly-by-night school. He lurches back through his memories and forward climactically to an unbearably painful reunion with his missing mother. As awful as it all sounds, the superb sentences and Aaron's basic goodness make the novel incredibly satisfying. It's reminiscent of A Prayer For Owen Meany. Quotes/aphorisms: "He disliked the artistic tendency to put nature into words. He felt that nature spoke sufficiently for itself.""Everyone on the bus was subdued the way people get when the weather has tricked them.""What people needed more than sex or love was the reassurance that others wanted to understand them and their fears.""She told me that when you lose the ability, the desire, to make your life interesting, then maybe it's not worth staying alive anymore.""People pretend otherwise, but they almost always do what they want to do.""There isn't always one person who's right and another who's wrong. Sometimes - usually - it's not that easy.""That was how couples worked, he knew, one always trying to offset the other's behavior.""We'd laugh, and sometimes we'd have sex because we had that in common: verbal sparring aroused us.""She had told him once that when she felt stuck, she tried to find the wherewithal to make just one change. If she could do that, sometimes everything else followed.""Her observation was that he needed to stop giving substance to his guilt."
    • 4/5
      I'm surprised that this is a debut novel. She writes like a veteran. This is beautifully written with characters you get to know on an intimate level. The protagonist's loneliness is very relatable. I love her storytelling, which is told in a series of flashbacks, but they're written in a very seamless fashion. I can see this becoming a book club selection. I highly recommend this book!
    • 4/5
      Aaron Englund has never lived alone. Literate and sensitive, caring and self-conscious to an almost debilitating degree, for the past twenty years Aaron has been a partner in an apparently loving but somewhat smothering relationship with Walter, a much older man who plucked him out of an emotionally desolate adolescence in small-town Minnesota and saw to his care and education. But Aaron is cursed with the self-doubting nature of the eternal outsider, someone who has never had much confidence in his accomplishments and rarely feels comfortable in his own skin. And so, just into his forties, he leaves Walter and their home in New Mexico and heads to San Francisco, where he will build a life that he can call his own. Lori Ostlund's novel After the Parade depicts the half-year of Aaron's life immediately after he sneaks away from Walter in the middle of the night (something else for him to feel guilty about). In San Francisco he finds a teaching job at a second-rate ESL school. Here he works with students who are facing challenges of their own, who are struggling to learn English and whose outsider status is without question. In the company of these students and while sorting through childhood memories that for years he has insulated himself from, Aaron gradually connects with a part of himself that enables him to act in order to make peace with a past filled with traumatic events (the sudden death of his father, being abandoned by his mother). After the Parade is leisurely paced but immensely satisfying, filled with eccentric characters and wry and astute observations on modern life. In her first novel Lori Ostlund has written a moving and emotionally charged portrait of one man that shows how the past influences the present in ways we hardly suspect, affecting our decisions and keeping us from doing the very things we must do in order to move forward.
    • 4/5
      Can a singular event change the lives of a family? I think this has been proven over and over to be true. In this case, the lives of the Englund family can be categorized as B.P. and A.P:before the parade and after the parade. The story is actually much deeper than that specific event, but it's role is pivotal in the lives of Dolores and Aaron.There is so much about this book that makes me think of the work of John Irving. I became emotionally tied to the characters, particularly Aaron. I found myself worrying about them and more than a little concerned as to how things were going to work out in their lives . Much like with Irving, who is my favorite author, the story is all about the characters. They are flawed and unconventional, yet capable of great kindness and insight.If you like a plot driven story, this one probably wouldn't be your best choice. If however, you appreciate books that are character driven and hopeful, this book might be perfect. It is often slow moving and sometimes seems even directionless, but, for me, that is exactly what brought out the details and lovely writing. It is a truly a book to savor.I thank Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title.
    • 4/5
      Aaron leaves his partner, a mam who he has spent much of his life with. He leaves him in the middle of the night, U-haul packed and ready to go.There is something so intimate, so real and heartbreaking about these characters. The author treats them and their stories with a great deal of sympathy. As Aaron tires to make it in San Fran, we learn about his past, his abusive father, his non descript mother and those who tormented and bullied him. We meet new people along with him, others we come to care about, want to know their stories. Aaron, however can not truly move forward until he comes to terms with his past.A very warm, realistic and heartbreaking story. Outland is a natural born storyteller, can't wait to see what she does next.