The beating heart of a lifeless town

Eleven years ago, with three books under his belt, Stewart O'Nan, then 35, was included in Granta's list of 20 best American novelists under 40. It was an incredible list that included Lorrie Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chris Offutt, Jonathan Franzen, Mona Simpson, David Guterson, Elizabeth McCracken, to name a few, all of whom have gone on to write lots of really fine fiction. It was the kind of list that made you wonder what was in the Kool-Aid, so to speak, in 1996.

O'Nan has not rested on his laurels, giving us eight novels and two works of nonfiction (on his beloved Red Sox, written with Stephen King, and on the deadly 1944 circus fire in Hartford, Conn.) since then. It is alarmingly difficult to find a negative review of any of his books.

An engineer in his prewriting life, O'Nan is often praised for his well-constructed novels in which ordinary people are placed in extraordinary situations, for his unforgettable renditions of working folks, his respect for his characters, his clean lines and elegant accumulation of detail, his mastery of vernacular and his rueful combination of horror and comedy (so like his favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor and King). It's almost too good to be true -- enough to make any self-respecting critic suspicious.

Fortunately, writing is one profession in which sleeping your way to the top is pretty much impossible. That leaves plagiarism, but O'Nan's voice is so wholly his own that we can't knock him there either.

No, he's just pure talent, and, like Manny, the main character in O'Nan's new novel, "Last Night at the Lobster," he's not afraid of hard work. Manny, 35, is a manager at a Red Lobster restaurant on a strip near a Connecticut mall.

Like so many of the author's previous books, the novel is set in winter. There's a blizzard on the horizon, and it's the restaurant's last night before the faceless parent company closes it down for not generating enough profit. In better days, the restaurant's staff numbered 44; only five will go with Manny to a nearby Olive Garden, owned by the same company.

Manny feels sentimental about the place and the people with whom he's worked. From the moment he opens up the restaurant until closing time on that last day, he thinks fondly about his time there. He's a good man, conscientious in his work; he takes care, for example, to salt the parking lot and to make sure the customers are treated so well that they'll want to return. His caring is the raw life force, the sap still running in this Godforsaken landscape.