Everyday People [Paperback]

Set in East Liberty, a wasted Pittsburgh community, the novel's action is compressed to one week in the lives of the Tolbert family. An 18-year-old son, Chris, has been paralyzed by a fall from a freeway overpass. This graffiti writing escapade took the life of his best friend.

His older brother, who found religion while in prison, is attempting to save another from the ravages of urban violence. While their father, Harold, is drawn to a homosexual relationship with a younger man.

Many of their neighbors stoically bear the vicissitudes wrought simply by their birth while longing for a better life.

Mr. O'Nan's ear for street patois is true, bringing authenticity to his spare yet compelling dialogue. As evidenced in his latest work, this author remains a master of minimalist prose blessed with maximum talent.

"Everyday People" is set in O'Nan's home town of Pittsburgh, a city defined by its close-knit neighborhoods. East Liberty is a predominantly black neighborhood. Once a thriving working-class community, a place of help and hope, it has been socially decimated by gangs and physically split by the construction of an express busway that effectively cuts it off from the rest of the city.

The novel is built of chapters that read like sharply defined, independent but interrelated short stories. Each holds fully developed characters, conflict and a finality of ending. Taken together, though, they build in power as they show the families, friends and lovers bound together in a tightly drawn picture of community.

These are gritty stories, well removed from worlds of polished comfort. The characters most central to the saga are those of the Tolbert family, each of whom is challenged by a different kind of desperation. Chris, 18, is a young man whose hopes were severed as completely as his spinal cord after a freak accident kills his best friend and confines him to a wheelchair. The twin comforts of pain pills and marijuana ease some of his physical symptoms, but he has to either uncover the inner resources to continue living or accept that he's effectively found himself in a life sentence without hope of parole.

Chris' brother, Eugene, has recently returned home after a jail term; he's learned his lesson, found the Lord and is looking to help the younger men in his neighborhood avoid his pitfalls. His efforts, though, are not enough to save a man who was once his best friend. Their father, Harold, recently has admitted to himself he's a homosexual, though it's not a secret he's shared with his family. He finds himself questioning whether he's now tied to them by responsibility or love - if it hadn't been for Chris' accident, he might well have been out of the house and living a different life with his boyfriend. Jackie doesn't understand why her marriage has fallen apart, but she's held together by the certain knowledge that "tragedies would come and go, and only faith stayed the same."

"Everyday People" is a book immersed in the rich complexity of character. In the most casual way, it explores the daily choices, large and small, deliberate or casual, that can forever change a life. It contrasts the choices offered by the paths of hope and despair. It investigates the pull and the obligations of love in all its wonderful, often difficult and sometimes ugly guises.