Novelist Stewart O'Nan pauses at the entrance to the Red Lobster Restaurant in Wethersfield. The lobster tank, fresher than most, is bubbling merrily. He points. "That big guy there is looking right at me," he says.

It's not only the lobsters who are taking notice. O'Nan, who lives in the Hartford area, is the author of Last Night at the Lobster (Viking), a short, powerful meditation on blue-collar working life in America. Specifically, it's a look behind the swinging doors at a Red Lobster in a fading New Britain mall. The restaurant is being closed by its corporate parents just before Christmas, simply because the numbers aren't being met. And so its ultra-loyal manager, Manny DeLeon, is off to a new life as assistant manager at an Olive Garden—but not before giving his all for one last night.

O'Nan has written 10 novels and nonfiction, too, including a bestselling book on the Red Sox with Stephen King. But his truest guise is as one of our finest literary novelists, one who can tell the story of A Christmas Carol through the eyes of people—that disintegrating team at the Lobster—whose lives are rarely illuminated.

New Haven Advocate: You actually did work as a dishwasher and a prep cook, though not in a Red Lobster?

Stewart O'Nan: For close to four years in the mid-'70s I worked at a catering organization attached to a synagogue on Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. My whole punk band not only worked there, for $2 an hour, but played there. That's how we made money for equipment; it was very punk and DIY.

Did that experience help you write Last Night at the Lobster? It certainly reads as if written by someone who'd been in the same place as Manny DeLeon.

Oh, sure. I've written about kitchens and what you might call super service jobs for a while now. Even in Snow Angels, my first novel, a character works in a kitchen. It's from my life experience—one of the first job settings I was ever in. I got to see the hierarchy, from managers on down.

I think what impressed reviewers about the book is that it manages to be both very nuts-and-bolts about the mechanics of managing the restaurant, and also beautifully written and full of information about the human condition.

The focus is narrow, but it's also charged, because it is Manny's last day and night. He's the one who cares most about it, and everything we see is through his eyes. It's kind of a memory book, because he's trying to save some of what means so much to him. This was one of the best times in his life, and it's going to be all gone. That lets you charge up your point-of-view character, and really do some nice detail work.

Is Manny just deluding himself? His co-workers are always needling him, and I think he knows that he shouldn't care so much.

It's obvious, in the context, that the Red Lobster chain doesn't care about him as much as he cares about his restaurant. They're closing an outlet that is actually profitable. Were you trying to make a point about the behavior of corporate America?

Not so much a point about corporate America as a point about some people like Manny. This is what he does. Most Americans are proud and hard-working, even when it doesn't promote their best interests. The fact that he's losing his job doesn't stop him from taking the demotion and continuing to do good work at the Olive Garden. He keeps going, and what are his options?

Is this one here a typical Red Lobster?

Actually, it's what they call the Coastal Home Redesign. It's supposed to remind you less of old-time seafood restaurants. There is lighter wood, pastels, wide-open spaces. The artwork is newer and brighter, and also there's a wine rack over there. They're trying to make it more upscale casual.

How did the book evolve?

The book is based on the closing of the Red Lobster in Torrington. I saw a little article, a paragraph, in the Farmington Valley News. It was about these regulars, churchgoers, who went there for lunch and found the place locked. They learned quite suddenly that it had been closed down. I had been to that mall there, and I started thinking about what it meant, and who it meant the most to. Suppose you were a regular at the Red Lobster we're in right now? You have to find a whole new place. Even when something as super-corporate as a Mobil station closes down, part of your life goes with it.

How did you research the book?

I came here. I was peeking through the swinging doors. Everywhere I went in the country I would stop in at a Red Lobster. Here in New England there's only the three, but in the rest of the country the chain is doing very well. The mom-and-pop fish restaurants offer real competition in this part of the country, but in the West and Midwest, the Lobster is often the only seafood place in town.

It's easy to see the book as a play or a movie.

It's been optioned. These guys have been writing a script for it.

Snow Angels was recently made into a film.

Yes, but I had no real involvement in it. They sent me an early screenplay, but I was working on other projects. And it felt like going over material I'd already done. So I just hoped that it would turn out well, and it did. I was very pleased. There are some fine performances in there and I think the director got the tone of the whole book right. About halfway through I realized that he was making it work.

Has Red Lobster reacted to your book at all?

Not really. I haven't heard anything from them, which is good in a way. They are kind of cast as a Scrooge, but because it's all through Manny's eyes it's also a love letter. He's the last person who would ever make fun of Red Lobster or the people who go there. He's a great ambassador in that sense.

I'm sure readers want to know what it was like to work with Stephen King on Faithful, your Red Sox book.

It was a lot of fun, and a great book to take on. The first printing was a million copies, a very different assignment from my usual thing. Stephen King was an exemplary collaborator, because he loves to write and writes very cleanly. He's the kind of guy who just knows the proper shape of a story or an anecdote. He's tireless, too—he just grinds and grinds and grinds. We met because I wrote a satirical novel that was originally called Dear Stephen King, and the King folks didn't like that very much. We had to change the title, and while those negotiations were going on I got in touch with Stephen to explain myself, writer to writer. So I met him through that. We're both Red Sox fans and we said maybe someday we'd get together and go see them. One day he called me up and said let's go. We clicked like that.

How did a Pittsburgh native like yourself end up in Avon?

I got a job teaching creative writing at Trinity [College, in Hartford]. But I was never on the tenure track there, despite the fact that at one point we were offering seven writing classes and I was teaching five of them. I was making the least amount of money, too. That helped propel me into writing full-time.

What is your next project?

I have a book coming out October 30 called Songs for the Missing (Viking). It's a novel about an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Ohio right on Lake Erie. And she disappears. She's supposed to report to work at a convenience mart and she never does. The book follows her parents, her best friend, her sister—the people who are closest to her. It shows how her disappearance and the search for her changes their lives. It's a sad, sad book. After I read it over I said, "Damn, I feel sorry for the reader." But people I trust tell me the sadness is not overwhelming.

jmotavalli@newmassmedia.com