Lori Ostlund is best known as a short story writer; her short fiction has won awards and been widely anthologized. So it really shouldn’t be any surprise that her debut novel, AFTER THE PARADE, offers readers the kind of minute attention to detail, the savoring of small moments and the precision of language that marks the very best short fiction. Notably, however, the book transcends these small moments that could have made it read more like a collection of vignettes than a fully realized narrative. Here, Ostlund offers readers a glimpse into one man’s unremarkable life, which becomes remarkable in the telling of it.

AFTER THE PARADE opens as 40-year-old Aaron Englund does a brave, terrifying and possibly stupid thing: he leaves Walter, the much older man who has been his partner and lover and, as Walter reminds him more often than Aaron would like, his savior over the past two decades. Aaron has been keeping lists for months of the many reasons why he should leave Walter, and he’s finally decided it’s time to act on it, even if doing so means moving from Walter’s comfortable home in New Mexico to a stiflingly tiny studio apartment carved out of a garage in San Francisco.

"AFTER THE PARADE is a skillful blend of small moments and big ideas, all centered on a memorable and genuinely sympathetic character whose story of letting go and finding home will resonate with readers for a very long time."

But even before he gets there, on the very first night away from Walter, Aaron gets involved in a violent domestic fight at the motel where he’s crashing, one that leaves a young boy in a coma. As he heads to California to start his new life, Aaron can’t get that boy out of his head, wondering who he is and if he will survive. Even as he struggles to get his bearings on a life without Walter and make a new home for himself, he finds his thoughts returning to his own difficult childhood in Minnesota, to the circumstances that led him to desire escape --- and to turn to Walter for salvation in the first place.

So many big themes are touched on in Ostlund’s quiet and tender novel, but what likely will remain with readers most of all is Aaron’s character --- thoughtful, introspective and genuinely compassionate. The questions he raises about his own life are ones readers will share, even if they don’t share the difficult and often tragic specifics of his early life. What do we owe the people who love us, who save us? Aaron wonders. What do we owe to strangers or to those whose lives we touch without even realizing it? Is it desirable or even possible to start one’s life over in middle age? What might it mean to do so?

Although Aaron is the novel’s central character, his story is surrounded by the vividly imagined lives of dozens of other minor characters, who help ground Aaron’s story and illustrate the human interactions that, for better or for worse, have shaped his life. AFTER THE PARADE is a skillful blend of small moments and big ideas, all centered on a memorable and genuinely sympathetic character whose story of letting go and finding home will resonate with readers for a very long time.