Hollow by Owen Egerton

Hollow is one of those rare novels that has two very different narrative threads that weave together into a very satisfying whole. Each of these threads alone would not have been as satisfying, one being too depressing and the other being too quirky. But together, they balance each other and create a fully realized portrait of the main character, Oliver, and the world that seems to both mock and inspire him.

At one point, Oliver has a very well to-do life as a college professor, husband, and father to a newborn son. But in one night, a bad choice and an unfortunate life event completely destroys Oliver’s world. We learn all of this in Oliver’s backstory as he grapples with understanding how God, or life, deals him very, very bad hands. In the present, we find Oliver living in a shack on the southside of Austin, Texas, almost destitute. He befriends Lyle in a book shop, who quickly introduces him to the Hollow Earth Society of Central Texas and their idea that the Earth is hollow and something or someone lives down there. Lyle enters a contest to join an expedition to the North Pole with a hollow earth expert to find an entrance to the inner world. And with this, he and Oliver begin their something-like buddy trip to join this expedition to the North Pole, if they can conjure up the $20,000 needed to be a part of it.

These are the two narrative threads that Owen Egerton weaves with aplomb. Alone, Oliver’s backstory would be too heartwrenching. And his friendship with Lyle is derivative of many well-known buddy stories in literature and movies. But together, these two threads weave a very satisfying literary tale of a man compelled to find meaning in a world that is both unrelenting with its maliciousness, but also beautiful with its acts of love. There is one violent turn late in the story that was off-putting and distracting from the story as a whole. Once I finished the novel, I realized that this violent turn was also unnecessary to the overall plot and without it, the story could have concluded in the same fashion. With this aside, the novel has a very satisfying ending, one in which Oliver’s friendship with his terminally ill friend, Martin, shows that acts of kindness and generosity are what make life worth living, even when the end is imminent.

I highly recommend this novel for lovers of literary fiction. 4 and a half out of five stars.

Buy the paperback on Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/152/9781640091610

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