Downtown Owl, population 800, is your town. The bowling alley is the most popular place to be, high school football players are celebrities, and everyone meets at the same dive bar night after night to talk about a) high school football or b) other inhabitants of the town.

Okay, maybe that isn't your town. But Owl's people are your people. Journalist and pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman's first novel, "Downtown Owl," released in September, tells the story of ordinary people and their everyday lives in Owl, N.D. in the year 1984. The plot revolves around three relatable characters: Mitch, the "angsty" high school quarterback, Julia, the twenty-something school teacher who just moved to town, and Horace, a widower who frequents the local coffeehouse with a few other senior citizens.

The book is divided into chapters that read like individual short stories. Each chapter jumps to a different character and a story consistently unrelated to the last. Klosterman is known for taking an unusual angle on a usual subject, and he does that well in "Downtown Owl." The organization allows the reader to feel as though he or she is not only listening in on all the neighborhood gossip but reading the minds of those gossiped about. The characters almost never interconnect, but somehow their individual stories are all joined. The association is typical Klosterman, juxtaposing polar arguments to make his point. These three people are the same because they are totally different.

The story follows the everyday lives of these relatively uninteresting people. Mitch is a quarterback who never gets much playing time and is constantly ridiculed by his coach, John Laidlaw. Laidlaw is an oft-stereotyped coach who has slept with and impregnated several high school girls in his career.

"John Laidlaw was a football coach, a pheasant hunter, a two-pack-a-day smoker, a notorious cheapskate, a deeply closeted atheist, and an outspoken libertarian. But he was also an English teacher, and-were it not for his preoccupation with convincing female students to have intercourse with him inside his powder-blue Caprice Classic-he might have been among the best educators in the entire state of North Dakota. He was certainly the finest teacher in Owl, even when you factored in the emotional cruelty and the statutory raping," he wrote.

Laidlaw takes special pride in humiliating Mitch, and plenty of Mitch's chapters in the book detail his hatred of Laidlaw. Among Mitch's other intellectual pursuits are things like basketball players at Georgetown University and how his classmates would fare in hypothetical fights.

On the first day of junior English class, Mitch spent the period thinking about how much he hated his coach and teacher, Laidlaw.

"Mitch fantasized about tying Mr. Laidlaw to a bed and cutting long incisions into his torso with a razor blade before filling the wounds with Morton salt. He closed his eyes and imagined the torture while Laidlaw spoke," he wrote.

Mitch's dark daydreams are more humorous than disturbing, and the exaggerated stories of torture are more obviously Klosterman's cynical personality embodied in a high school senior.

Julia, the newest edition to Owl from an inner-city teaching job in Chicago, spends most of the book first enjoying her far-reaching popularity with the men of Owl, as she is the only young single women in town, and later obsessing over the only man in Owl who isn't avidly pursuing her.

"In baseball and sex, clichés are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care," he wrote.

Julia finds a niche drinking every night at the seven bars of Owl, and trying to get Vance Druid, the detached former high school football star, to notice her. Perhaps Julia's most enjoyable chapter was one in which she and Vance have a conversation, and the narrator notes what each character says and what he or she actually means.

Julia is a mostly non-descript twenty-something, going through the motions during the day, and drinking all night, but Klosterman's witty sense of self-awareness resounds in her character. If Klosterman were a girl, he would have been Julia.

"If Julia didn't like you, no one could ever say, 'Well there are a lot of other fish in the sea.' There was one fish, and it lived in a lake with no tributaries and all the competing villagers read Field and Stream with extreme prejudice. The arrival of an unattached female teacher was a romantic race against time. And no matter how much she enjoyed her insular celebrity (and regardless of how nicely these desperate, lonely men seemed to treat her), Julia knew that it was perverse. She thought about it all the time," he wrote.

Horace is perhaps the least Klosterman-like character, and ostensibly the most universally relatable character in the book. His life consists of a daily coffee hour with several other men at a local restaurant, where they shoot the breeze and gamble with dice.

"Every day at 3:00 p.m., he drove three miles into town, sat on the third stool in Harley's Café, and drank three cups of coffee, each cup with three tablespoons of sugar. This was not because Horace Jones had OCD or a superstitious obsession with the number three; it was just a coincidence," he wrote.

Still, Horace carries some trademark Klosterman traits. He is obsessed with espionage and war. Horace always wanted to fight in a war, but never got the opportunity to do so, and he has obsessed over it his whole life. He has Klosterman's quick wit and intelligent albeit blunt demeanor.

"Downtown Owl" reads like a fictionalized autobiography of Chuck Klosterman in many ways. The characters often sound more like Klosterman in another person's body than distinct well-rounded characters, but it works.

"Downtown Owl" is the Seinfeld of novels. It's mostly about nothing, yet Klosterman's pithy humorous writing and personal injection into each character makes the relatively general plot entertaining and laugh out loud funny. It is not the individual characters that make the reader laugh, it's Klosterman. He makes each of these normal characters interesting. Let's face it. If you picked up this novel, you didn't do it for its endearing small-town plot. You did it because it had Klosterman's name on it.

The plot and characters relate a story we've heard before, but Klosterman makes each of these characters interesting and clever. His sharp intellect and the way he relates tongue-in-cheek observations of reality make the book fresh and entertaining. If he would have strayed too much from his voice, the book would have lost much of what makes it remarkable.

Klosterman gets a bit too comfortable in his writing at the end of the book, however. The climax and the conclusion of the book are shocking even though Klosterman provided some foreshadowing near the beginning of the story.

Shocking as the ending may be, it is ultimately ineffective. The story moves along in an aimless and amusing sort of way, and is concluded too abruptly for its overall tone. The end of the story seemed disconnected with the rest of the plot. But even so, the direct and harsh ending was infused with a Klosterman-esque callus, and, looking back on the outcome, you see the point. "Downtown Owl" gives meaning to meaningless life. These people are the locals that hang out in our dive bars, live on our streets and sit in our classrooms. We are all residents of Owl. The point is to decide where we go from there.