Why this book: I’ll admit that the reason I picked this book to be the first of this “project” is really that I got it for $1, in hardback, at a nearby used book store (Book Thug Nation–highly recommended). I hadn’t heard of the novel, or the author, and had no preconception of what I was getting into.
Plot: A gay guy prepares for a party.
Story: For the last 30 or so years, talentless, but famous, artist Lowell Haven has been passing his wife’s work off as his own. For the last 20 odd years the family has been living apart, him with his rich boyfriend, her with their daughter. The party at the climax of the novel sees them all in the same room again after several years.
Dramatic Question: Will Lowell Haven’s grip on his family finally be loosened?
Narrative Structure: 1st person present, Fergus (rich boyfriend), 3rd person present/ close, Merit (daughter), 1st person past via found dairies, Jenny (wife), and a minor thread is told via faux magazine articles in the fantasy mind of Fergus.
The only reason I am disappointed that this was as much of a snoozefeset as it was, is that Adrienne Miller is clearly intelligent, and, more than that : she is wise. She writes a fine sentence and thematically the novel is truly compelling. It’s all about the eye, and vanity and the me, and is very modern, without slipping into misanthropic humans-are-too-stupid-to-live arguments. Fergus is really a fine 21st century Mrs. Dalloway–the whole novel leads up to his fete, and the final scene even includes an airborne message from him to his narcissistic lover (one might recall Woolf’s toffee advertisement afloat in London). Miller is clever, for sure, but the book, in the end lacks a real punch, as if she was finishing it on deadline, or had taken too many pieces of advice from her graduate creative writing workshop, and ended up neutering her own vision.
Complaining about a book because nothing happens probably makes me sound like a high school freshman who hates reading, so I won’t. I will complain, though, because these characters don’t change. There is no forward momentum, no action and no resolution. The two biggest victims of the vanity of the artist Lowell Haven, his boyfriend and his wife, do, in the final pages, sever their ties, but these changes are abrupt. Since we’ve had no indication that these changes are coming, there is, therefore, little reason to believe that they are permanent. Furthermore, Merit, who is the reader’s main focus, is married to, and is cheating on, an uptight nerd who we have no love for, and I’m disappointed that the novel ends without resolution about their relationship.
There are also a few sloppy places, things that are difficult to explain as something other than poor editing, such as the fact that there are three separate incidents in which some character complains about glue or “tape gunk” on their finger. WHY?? (If this was to show us that there is some supernatural connection between these characters, it was a pretty paltry connection.)
Overall, a really solid writer who I would (might) read again, but a disappointment as an oeuvre. It was a joy to see “queerness” of some sort in what is otherwise a very “straight” and “mainstream” novel.
Best read in: medium-sized European airport, drinking a $6 coca-cola.