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. (Aug.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. Markley’s novel is alternately disturbing and gorgeous, providing a broad view of the anxieties of a post-9/11 Middle America and the complexities of the humans who navigate them. As the night progresses, the long-buried truth behind a horrifying town legend takes shape, offering a window into the raw forces that shape the town and its residents. There’s Bill Ashcraft, who drives into town to deliver a package to a familiar recipient Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate who’s sucked into the mystery of her former lover’s disappearance veteran Dan Eaton, who returns from Afghanistan with a prosthetic eyeball and emotional wounds and Tina Ross, who confronts a violent part of her past. 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. 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 the four, whose rudderless adult lives pale alongside the blinding lights of their adolescence.

In Markley’s standout debut novel (following nonfiction works Publish This Book and Tales of Iceland), four former high school classmates return to their Ohio hometown to make amends.

Ohio by Stephen Markley