Ohio by Stephen Markley

 This is not a happy novel. I mean, you probably wouldn't expect a novel set in dying-small-town Ohio to be happy, but this novel conveys all the hopelessness of growing up in a small down where all the actual industries have shut down and all that's left for jobs is crap retail or the nursing home, and the people who live there conspire to keep people with dreams of escape tied down like Gulliver. There are a couple of long-term escapees, but even they find themselves returning to the gravity well occasionally. The brutality of small-town high school is etched in this novel deeply enough to draw blood (large suburban high school isn't all that much better, but I remember much more in the way of subcultures that overlapped, sometimes barely, sometimes not at all) and the scars from that formative time linger and accrue and wrinkle and choke and kill. The characters are neatly portrayed, complex and individual; the prose is solid and occasionally sparkles. The story arcs overlap and reinforce each other and tangle and tighten as the novel progresses. There are maybe some moments of muddle, but this is a very solid novel.