Set in small-town North Dakota in 1983 and 1984, Owl chronicles the lives of 17-year-old Mitch, 23-year-old Julia and 73-year-old Horace. In Owl, "everybody knows everything about everybody," a fact that impacts each character deeply. High school student Mitch doesn't see what qualifies 1984's Oceania as a dystopia, considering its similarity to 1984's Owl. Upon moving to town, history teacher Julia tries to understand what it means to already be known by people she's never met. There are things that other people don't know about Horace, and he fears his secrets' revelation will make him a laughing stock among his friends.

The characters and dialogue feel authentic for the most part, and the choice of three narrators, though initially disorienting, actually enhances the listening experience quite a bit. Klosterman's approximation of drunkspeak, when slurred by reader Lily Rabe, is accurate enough that you'll wish you could buy the characters a round of Shirley Temples. Wiley Wiggins, best known for his role as freshman Mitch Kramer in Dazed and Confused, is predictably pitch-perfect at imitating high school speech patterns. Philip Baker Hall's reading adds further dimension to the sympathetic complexities of Horace and his curmudgeonly friends.

Owl and its inhabitants are fictional, but the events occurring around them — including the blizzard that opens and closes the novel ¬— are real. Though Klosterman's fidelity to historical fact is meant to lend the plotline an air of credibility, the constant interplay of the true and the false (or, in the parlance of his teenage characters: the T and the F) can sometimes do the opposite. Still, given the author's reflexive tendency toward cultural references, it's to his credit that his frequent allusion only rarely overshadows his story. Despite the innumerable opportunities offered by the era he's chosen, Klosterman never stoops to spoof. His attempts at humor can be overreaching at times, but when he gets it right, the results are stunningly original.