![]() ![]() He hasn’t heard from her since, nor has he tried to find her. She’s neglectful/abusive in her own odd way, and abandons Aaron without explanation when he’s 17. His mother, Dolores, never recovered from his death. When he was 5, his father - a police officer who was verbally abusive, and possibly worse, to his son and wife - died after falling off a parade float (hence the novel’s title). Ostlund makes clear that Aaron was dealt a dismal hand. His solitude triggers memories - and “After the Parade,” for most of its 300-odd pages, unfolds in flashback. Moving into a converted garage in San Francisco’s “fog belt,” he picks up another ESL job where he enjoys his students, but leads an isolated existence. But some late-blossoming urge toward independence has Aaron wanting to wrench free of this benign embrace. Aaron readily acknowledges that Walter “saved” him from wretched circumstances when he was 18, giving him both an education and entree into the life he was after. Walter’s nurturing love, it seems, has grown smothering after 20-odd years. As the book opens, however, Aaron is about to set off for San Francisco to live on his own for the first time in his life. Now comes Ostlund’s first novel, “After the Parade,” which ramps up the self-conscious self-defeating tendencies of its central character to an extraordinary degree.įorty-one-year-old Aaron Englund, an ESL teacher originally from small-town Minnesota, lives with his older lover Walter in Albuquerque. ![]()
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